daily java

Daily Java:

Let your wife be a fountain of blessing for you. Rejoice in the wife of your youth. (Proverbs 5:18)

Ella had her birthday this past week. It was the annual observance of her 39th birthday. We hold the  observance (obviously since it is called annual) every year. And every year it surprises me.

When I was a young preacher, I went to visit with an old couple. He was still in command of most of his faculties, but she was obviously mentally out of the loop. She was deep in the throes of what we called at the time senility, but probably what we would call Alzheimer’s today.

He and I were sitting in the living room talking. She was just sitting staring. She was obviously gone mentally. But as we talked, he looked at her and mentioned the fact that to him she looked the same. They had been married a long time and she didn’t look all that different to him.

My thought was that the old geezer had slipped several cogs. She was a drooling old woman sitting staring vacantly at the coffee table. I was, you remember, a 26 year old young man, with little or no perspective of my own.

Ella is having problems in her life. She has trouble doing many of the things she used to do so easily. She has also had several celebrations of her 39th birthday by now. She has to ride a scooter and takes about 7/8ths of a pound of drugs a day to deal with the constant pain brought on by her MS.

Yet – and here is the amazing revelation that I have almost forty years later – when I look at her, I do not really notice that. It is not that I sit and stare at an older woman all day thinking, boy howdy, she has changed. The change has been so gradual that I only notice it once in a while, usually when I look at an older picture. She really does not look all that different to me.

I will have to admit, she has changed physically less than many women I have known. I know. General stuff has changed, but she still has the same quality of look that she has always had. I still remember the 17 year old girl in the bowling alley after the big youth rally in Houston. I still remember the girl I proposed to. I still remember our wedding day. I still remember all of the stuff that came since.

When I look at her, I do not see her with the eyes of today, but with the eyes of an almost 42 year old marriage. I have known her since 1969 and since we have gotten married, have seen her every day. I have kissed her over 50,000 times, probably more. We have been through so much.

But we went through it all in a day by day relationship. It is not like we only see each other once a week or once a month. It still amazes me to see my Facebook friends I went to high school with. There was a forty year gap from the last time I saw them and they are different. I would not have recognized them if I had met them on the street.

But I have to admit that Ella has changed less than many I know. Her basic quality was always sweet and still is. She has shifted in size and stuff in the past forty some odd years, but who hasn’t? She still looks the same to me.

And I am glad. I would hate to look at a woman every day and think, wow, she has gotten old. Of course, she would be thinking the same thing about me. I am not the tall, strong, vibrant guy I was either. In fact, in spite of her illness, she has worn a lot better than I have.

I just want to sit with her on the couch while a self-important little preacher comes to see me and to tell him the same thing. She looks the same to me.

i was not a wild young man, but i was fringe at times

Do not remember the rebellious sins of my youth. Remember me in the light of your unfailing love, for you are merciful, O Lord. (Psalm 25:7)

I was not a wild young man, but I was fringe at times. There was within me a need to express myself and a desire to not have anyone tell me what to do. I had a bad temper and was strong and those are two things that don’t really go well together.

It wasn’t that I was rebellious in the sense that I went around looking for fights. It was just that I was rebellious enough that I tended to make people uncomfortable.

My hair was always too long and I dressed in a way that set me apart. My favorite outfit in my early 20’s was tan Levis bush jeans, a black shirt, a wild tie I had gotten in Germany, buckle suede shoes (also gotten in Germany), topped off by an Army dress green suit jacket. I loved that outfit and wore it to church whenever I could.

This attitude got me in some trouble at times. No one tried to fight me or anything. I was a little too big to have a lot of physical argument. But people didn’t know how to take me, nor what to expect from me. So they tended to go behind my back. They still do.

I was large and loud and boisterous and confrontational. I was definitely not a company man.

Yet I had friends in the church where we went in Houston when we were first married. There were people who liked me. I suppose they saw the regular young man underneath and knew that I loved God and the church.

In fact, often my best friends were the ministers of the churches we attended. That was one thing that pushed me into the pastorate: just a plain old identification with them and acceptance by them.

And since they liked me, the church usually liked me. I guess they viewed me as the congregational eccentric.

And I carried it out a long ways, even to my vehicle of choice.

I had a 1956 Chevrolet pickup, light faded blue, with a Ford bed. It had bars all over it for hauling lumber. And it’s name was Ralph.

I loved that pickup and went everywhere in it. It was a great fit for me. It just looked like me.

It had a foot starter and a couple of holes in the floor and I bought it for $60, a great deal even in 1972. It had been taken care of by its previous owner and served me well until winter of 1974 when it got too cold and the block cracked.

That hurt. It was almost as if a part of my life was over. I gave it to a guy who always liked it. He put in block stop leak and painted it purple with a roller. He also wrote RALPH on the door in yellow paint.

It was almost as if someone had taken the body of a friend and painted it up and put it on display.

I have never had a vehicle since that I loved as much as that truck, even the new 1981 Mustang with T Tops that bought me. That truck was me. I drove with the radio blaring (an AM radio, of course). Whenever I hear Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie, it shoots me back to 1972, driving to the shop where I worked for the telephone company in Houston over on Bissonet.

At that point, I guess I changed some. I went to seminary, and started dressing more regularly, cutting my hair more, shaving more.

But the internal man – the one that a woman told me once reminded her of a wolf/dog mix: dog on the outside with the wolf coming out occasionally – stayed for a while. It was just kind of submerged.

The motorcycle helped when I finally got one at 30 years old.

last sunday I talked to a young woman

Last Sunday I talked to a young woman. This is not all that unusual for a pastor, but what was unusual was that this woman was in her 80’s. She is diminishing in mental capacity, stooped over, her hands are shaking.

I leaned over, like I do sometimes. Since I am 6’3”, and she was about 4’something, I had to bend down a ways. She couldn’t really look up.

I said, Hi, pretty girl. She looked behind her and said, I don’t think you are talking to me and she smiled. When she did, she was young.

We bantered a bit. As we did, it dawned on me how the young woman looked and sounded. Even though she was old, she was suddenly young and talking to a man.

When I was young, probably in my mid 20’s, a friend and I went to visit an old man and his wife. She was in the far stages of what we called senility at the time. She knew nothing of anything. He had her sitting beside him in her chair, but there was no communication.

As he and we were talking, he said, I know my wife is older, but when I look at her, I still see the young woman I married.

My first thought was, you are crazy old man. That woman looks like an old, brain dead woman. Remember I was young.

As I get older, I realize he was right. My wife looks the same to me most of the time. There are times like today, when she worked too hard and was having problems. At those times she looks tired and drawn.

But she still looks like Ella, my wife. And I love her. To young people, she is an older woman. But to me, she is my love and eternally young.

The woman I talked to last Sunday, for a few moments, was young again, almost coquettish. I enjoyed making her acquaintance, if not for just a brief time.

I look forward to it again.