I did not start writing “REMAINING” when I began this manuscript.
In many ways, I had been writing it for years without realizing it.
Long before there was a book, there was a Bible.
I was eight years old when my grandmother, Fleta Clark, gave me my first Bible. She was a faithful woman who made sure I knew who Jesus Christ was and that God’s Word mattered. I can still remember lying on the living room floor with that Bible open before me, reading for hours. I certainly did not understand everything I read, but even as a boy, I sensed something different about the words on those pages.
There was power in them.
As meaningful as that beginning was, my journey with Jesus did not follow a straight line from childhood faith to spiritual maturity. Far from it. There were seasons when I read the Bible faithfully and seasons when I barely opened it. I believed in Jesus. I knew about Jesus. I knew many of the things Christians are supposed to know.
What took me much longer to understand was that knowing about Jesus and following Him are not necessarily the same thing.
For much of the next forty years, that distinction defined more of my life than I would care to admit.
Eventually, I made a simple commitment: I would read the Bible every day and not put it down again. At the time, I think part of me believed that taking God’s Word more seriously might solve some of the problems I was facing.
Instead, life became harder.
There was a season when the darkness grew so deep that I reached a point where I no longer wanted to live. I do not share that to make the story dramatic, nor do I believe every detail belongs in these pages. I share it because leaving it out would make what happened next sound cleaner than it was.
God, in His mercy and grace, did not let my story end there.
If you are in that place as you read this, please do not carry it alone. Tell someone today, such as a pastor, a doctor, or a trusted friend. In the United States, you can call or text 988 at any time to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Asking for help is not a failure of faith.
Through that darkness, He began showing me something I should have understood much earlier. Christianity was not simply about reading the Bible, accumulating knowledge of Scripture, attending church, or knowing facts about Jesus Christ.
It was about following Him.
By God’s grace, I began learning how to do that.
I have continued reading God’s Word every day since making that commitment. There have been good seasons and painful ones, times of tremendous gratitude and times when I did not understand what God was doing. Scripture has not removed every difficulty from my life, nor has reading it made me immune to poor decisions, failure, fear, disappointment, or the need for correction.
What it has done is continually draw me back to Jesus.
And God has continued to use His Word to work on me.
When the Writing Began
In 2020, something began to happen during those daily times spent in Scripture.
Thoughts began forming as I read. Passages I had encountered before began to connect with one another. I would see something in a verse that prompted me to examine my own life. One thought led to another, and eventually I began writing those thoughts down.
I wasn’t trying to become an author.
I was trying to understand what God was teaching me.
Those writings eventually became the blog titled Standing Firm in Faith.
When I go back and read some of those early pieces now, I can see the seeds of questions that would eventually become the questions in this book.
Am I living out what I claim to believe?
What does following Jesus change about the way I treat other people?
What does Scripture reveal about me that needs correction?
Am I living primarily for myself, or is the selfless love of Christ becoming evident in my life?
What should I do when I fail?
What has God taught me that could help someone else?
And perhaps most importantly, when everything else is stripped away, is Jesus enough?
I didn’t realize it at the time, but those questions were leading somewhere.
Then the Questions Became More Personal
Time has a way of changing the questions we ask.
When we are younger, much of life is about building. We build careers, families, financial stability, relationships, reputations, and plans. There is always another milestone ahead.
Eventually, however, we reach an age when we begin to view time differently.
I did.
The question was no longer simply what I wanted to accomplish next. I began to think more seriously about what God had already placed in my hands and what faithfulness should look like in whatever time remains.
That is where REMAINING began.
This book is not the work of a man who believes he has figured out how to live the second half of life perfectly.
I haven’t.
I am still learning.
I am still growing.
I am still being corrected.
I am still discovering places where I need to change my priorities.
By the grace of God, I am still following Jesus.
That matters because I do not want you to read this book as if I were standing at the finish line, shouting instructions backward.
I am on the road too.
The questions on these pages are ones I have had to ask myself. The Scriptures that challenge the reader first challenged me. When the book asks whether work has become too important, whether enough has ever been defined, whether our wives are receiving our best or merely what remains after everything else has taken its share, whether our adult children need influence rather than control, whether our wisdom is being given away, or whether our lives are increasingly ordered around Jesus > Others > Self, I am not exempt from that examination.
I am standing under the same Word.
Why I Wrote REMAINING
When Standing Firm in Faith began, I made three commitments about my writing, and I want them to guide this book as well.
First and foremost, I want what I write to glorify God. If these pages ultimately leave the reader thinking primarily about John Clark, I have missed the point. I want them to point beyond me to Jesus Christ.
Second, I pray that something in this book encourages another person to walk more closely with Him. If this book prompts a man to open his Bible again, love his wife more intentionally, call his child, forgive someone, seek reconciliation, give more generously, invest in a younger man, tell his family what God has done, or simply take one more faithful step with Jesus, then writing it has been worthwhile.
Third, I want to remain teachable. I am a student of God’s Word, not an authority over it. Scripture is the authority. Where my thinking needs correction, I want God’s Word to correct it. Where my plans conflict with His purposes, I want my plans to change.
That is also why the Remaining Years Plan you will build in these pages is never intended to be the center of the book.
Jesus is.
The plan is a tool.
He is the Savior.
God Has Been Faithful
Looking backward has become different for me as I have grown older.
I can see failures more clearly than I once did. I can recognize places where pride affected decisions, where priorities became disordered, where I could have loved people better, and where I spent too much energy worrying about things that ultimately proved far less important than I had thought.
But I can also see something else even more clearly.
God has been faithful.
He was faithful when a grandmother placed a Bible into the hands of an eight-year-old boy.
He was faithful during the years when that boy grew into a man who knew about Jesus but still had much to learn about following Him.
He was faithful during the darkness.
He was faithful when His Word became more than something I knew; it became a means by which He continually confronted, encouraged, corrected, and changed me.
He was faithful when thoughts written during quiet time in Scripture became a blog post.
He was faithful through years I would gladly relive and through years I would never choose to relive.
And He is faithful today.
That is why this book ultimately isn’t about aging.
It is about what we do with the life God has placed in our hands while it remains ours to steward.
I do not know how many years I have left.
Neither do you.
But I know more clearly what I want those years to look like.
I want Jesus first.
I want to love others more selflessly.
I want self to occupy its proper place.
I want to share what God has taught me rather than keep it to myself.
I want the people I love to know they were loved, too.
I want my life to point more clearly toward Christ at the end than it did at the beginning.
And when I fail—and I will—I want to return quickly to the grace of the One who has remained faithful through every chapter of my story.
That is why I wrote “REMAINING.”
Not because I have arrived.
I am still following.
And if you find yourself asking some of the same questions about whatever years God may grant you, I invite you to walk with me through the pages that follow.
We will not begin by trying to predict how much time remains.
We will begin by asking for wisdom to use it well.
And through it all, I want to remember the love at the center of everything Jesus has called us to become:
“Greater love has no one than this, that a person will lay down his life for his friends.” — John 15:13 (NASB 2020)
That is the love of Jesus.
That is the example before us.
And that is the kind of selfless love I want to increasingly embody in whatever years remain.
To God be the glory.
John Clark, a grateful follower of Jesus Christ