To Grow Old is a Privilege
I am thinking big, beautiful thoughts about growing old.
I was standing at my sink gulping down cold water when the idea suddenly engulfed me: I know and love women who no longer sip water on earth.
Oh, how exquisite is living, and oh how brief.
I closed my eyes, and eternity felt as though it was just - right there. At hand. It was as though the door was cracked open into heaven, and I stood in the threshold.
There was the setting sun. How completely appropriate. There was the liquid-fresh of water. The cool of the edge of the copper sink on my hand as it rest there. The songs of the birds through the open window. My aching body - now closer to 60 than 50 - after having worked hard all day.
I am exquisitely alive, and the time I have left to me is far shorter than the time I have behind me.
I said to the Holy Spirit, in that moment: “I will not do this thing without You. I stand here basking in every good and perfect gift of gardens and grandchildren and painting and passion and sunshine and flowers and the love of one lionhearted man. I have been young, and now I am old(ish) and I have never seen the righteous forsaken. I have friends who are faithful and fun. I have walked cobblestone streets of Europe and watched my children’s children play in the same yard my children played in. We’ve planted a thriving church together, You and I and The Preacher. So much is already mine, so many experiences of Your love that can never be taken from me, as I hit this fourth quarter of life’s game.
But Your manifest Presence AS I GROW OLD is my urgency, God! Very little else matters. Nothing else will give these remaining years any coherent context. The joy of Your Presence - that alone is the Indispensable Thing.”
I hope these thoughts do not sound dark or macabre to you, because all of that “Fleeting Immediate Raw Emotion” (F.I.R.E. - an acronym I often use in my art courses and classes) felt anything but dark. Rather, it felt powerful and strengthening and, dare I say it, almost giddy.
It felt like the sort of inspiration that would fuel a freaking legit artist.
Life is a marvel. To be sitting here, typing words on a Tuesday, words that will be blown like dandelion seeds to the ends of the earth, is marvelous. To grow old in God is a thrill.
I got a tiny taste of concentrated Comfort and Joy, that day standing at my copper sink. I drank distilled delight.
Heaven on earth, in a nondescript kitchen.
“(God said): My Presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest. And (Moses) responded, ‘If Thy presence go not up with me, carry us not up hence.’ ”
