Meditations for Baby-Boomers at 60

James C. Schaap weaves together personal history, commentary, and reflections on the psalms in his new book Sixty at Sixty, a heartfelt rendering of how God has accompanied the writer through six decades of  life.

In many ways, the book is about the small as well as the significant things that have touched, defined and inspired Schaap, a professor of English at Dordt College, over the years.

Using the psalms as the touchstone for his reflections, he writes about solitary times at home with his wife, the anguish he experiences over a son's struggle with depression, and about characters such as Harry, an eccentric old man with lung cancer who spoke to him about "the righteousness of God."

The book also touches on the triumphs and tribulations of Schaap's career spent teaching literature and writing novels, short stories, pieces of journalism and devotionals for young people.

Although Schaap aims his stories and musings at baby boomers such as himself in his new book, its audience is wider than that..

"Jim Schaap pauses on the cusp of sixty years of living, steps aside, and lets sixty fragments of old prayers often prayed, psalm phrases all, form six decades of people and experiences, conversations and observations, into a coherent story of faith" for adults of all ages, says author and theologian Eugene Peterson in his foreword to the book.

Recently published by Faith Alive Christian Resources, the publishing agency for the Christian Reformed Church in North America, Schaap's prayer-based memoir is filled with touches of grace, conversations with God and a view of the world that is colored by Schaap's Christian Reformed faith.

"The basic paradigm by which I've always seen the Christian life is the outline of the drama that arises from the doctrine with which I was raised. The outline goes like this: Sin, salvation, service," he writes in the book.

He also writes: "Life is so precious, its joys so brittle, so sweet – a few good words, a dawn, a little barbeque sauce, an acquaintance with a deer … and all of it made more precious surely, by the imminent reality of dying."

The new book emerged from a longer project in which he wrote somewhere around 365 devotional reflections, based on the style from Abraham Kuyper's Near Unto God, a book he revised substantially a few years ago. He focused mainly on nature and wide open spaces in those Kuyper-inspired meditations, Schaap says.

He showed some of what he had written to his pastor who, also nearing 60, said he enjoyed the ones about getting older. "Honestly, I wasn't aware of that being a theme in the collection I'd been writing; but I wasn't surprised that it was," says Schaap.

Writing the devotionals based on the psalms had strong impact on his own faith life, and especially his understanding of the psalms, says Schaap.

"What is so wonderful about the psalms is the kind of companionship they offer. There is a rainbow of human emotion in the psalms," he says. "The psalms help you realize that no matter what happens, other people have been through this. The psalms are an incredible benefit to the human soul."

A sample chapter is available on the Faith Alive website.