daily java

Daily Java:

Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” (James 4:13-15)

I have been thinking about the old song the Beatles sang, Yesterday, in which they were longing for a time that is gone.

I am 61 years old. It is truly hard to imagine. What happened to my life?

I know I have been alive. I have memories, scars, momentoes, yet I am already 61 years old. At best I only have about 30 years left.

I remember so much. And so much of seems just yesterday.

I talked to an old man and woman back when I was in seminary. As were visiting, his wife sat at his side, obviously without much thought going on. It was apparent that she had what we called at the time senile dementia. As we talked, the old man said that she looked to him just as she did when they were young. My thought was that he was senile too. The old woman looked nothing like a younger person.

As I get older, I see what he meant. My wife looks so similar to me. I look at old pictures and at her today and she has changed her essential lines remarkably little. Looking at her, except for her disability, it is hard to imagine 40 years have passed.

When I was contacted for my 40th high school reunion, it almost staggered me. Had it been so long? I knew that on one level, but on another, more visceral level, I had not accepted it. Looking at my friends from high school, and how much older they were, I almost went into a funk.

But it has been that long. I have outlived so much in our culture. My generation went through the music and sexual revolution, the disco craze, the eighties, on into the nineties with the president of the US helping to erode our sexual mores even more, and are into a culture now of fear. America has changed so much. And so have I.

I have been a minister of the gospel for 37 years. I left the denomination I was raised in, and had two degrees in, and pastored in for 20 years. Since then, I have been a part of four different denominations. Three of them I was glad to come into, and found out quickly that I did not fit. Theologically I have shifted around so much that I am almost not recognizable as the same preacher.

And there have been so many things happen in my life, some great and some tragic. I have triumphs and terrible mistakes. I have been well-off and homeless. I have pastored large churches and small ones. Ella and I lived in Europe for six months and my family has lived all over the United States. I have gained and lost 400 pounds probably.

And where I am today, both professionally and physically, is a place and a situation that I never dreamed I would be in.

Not that it is bad. It just surprises me. if my life has had nothing else, it has had surprises.

And it has been so short.