One day when John Quincy Adams, one of America's early presidents was
80 years of age, a friend met him on a street in Boston. "How is John Quincy Adams?" the
friend inquired. "John Quincy Adams
him-self is very well, thank you. But
the house he lives in is sadly dilapidated.
It is tottering on its foundations.
The walls are badly shattered, and the roof is worn. The building trembles with every wind, and I
think John Quincy Adams will have to move out of it before long. But he hiimself is very well."
Consider that Golda Meir was 71 when she became Prime Minister of
Israel. George Bernard Shaw was 94 when
one of his plays was first produced.
Benjamin Franklin was a framer of the U.S. Constitution at the age of
81. Thomas Edison was still making pioneering discoveries at 83. Michaelangelo was 80 years of age when he
designed the dome for St. Peter's.
Goethe was 81 when he finished Faust.
And Pablo Cassals at the age of 93 was still practicing the cello five
or six hours a day. Someone said,
"Pablo, why do you practice the cello?
You're 93!" He said,
"Because I think I'm making some progress!"
Agatha Christie, the late mystery writer who married H.E. Mallowen, the
famous archeologist, who once quipped, "There are some tremendous
advantages to marrying an archeologist--for one thing, the older you get, the
more interested he becomes in me."
A 103-year-old woman told her doctor after her annual check-up:
"See you next year." The
doctor kiddingly replied, "What makes you so confident about
that?" And she said: "How many
103-year-olds do you see dying?"
Arie Brouwer, prior to his death from colon cancer in 1993 at age 58,
was a leader in the Reformed Church in America, and had formerly been general
secretary of the National Council of Churches. In his final months, he wrote:
"These
days I hold out very little hope for my cancer to be cured. I haven't given up,
but the statistics steadily weigh in ever heavier against it. In spite of all
that, I find my feelings of hope undiminished! How do I explain that even
within the household of faith, to say nothing of a skeptical world? How do I
keep people from feeling as I speak of this, or as they read this, that I am
clutching at a straw? That I am deceiving myself, using hope as a form of
escapism from the harsh reality of terminal illness and death? How do I
communicate that in truth we do not sorrow as those who have no hope (1 Thessalonians
4:13)? I believe that death is not the end, not the last word. ...
"Having
believed all of this for many years, my feelings of hope are strong. I am not
filled with dismay or anger or bitterness. This is true in spite of the aching
disappointment I feel related to the people I want to be with and the things I
would like to do in this life ... This experience of hope in spite of
everything is to me even more important than the experience of faith in spite
of everything. ... I am profoundly grateful for both."
Life is a continuum, not a discrete series of
breaks. Old age should not be another
period like infancy, adolescence, or maturity.
Ideally, it should be a summation of the whole, a flowering experience
of fulfillment. It should include and
represent the earlier periods, but not obliterate them. There is nothing superior about
youthfulness. It is a stage neither to
cherish nor to reject. We should
incorporate within us, along with all the other stages that go to make up the
full spectrum of our total person. This
is obviously what Browning had in mind when he sang: "Grow old along with
me! The best is yet to be" (from
poem Rabbi Ben Ezra).
Life is a flow, not a dead-end street. Added years are added opportunities, but you
have the responsibility to use them creatively.
If you make a full-time job of trying to appear youthful, you are
actually making a business of age. But
age is none of your business. Your true
business is "the express business," becoming a creative channel for the
flow of life.
The Easter message tells us that our
enemies--sin, the curse and death--are beaten.
Ultimately, they can no longer start mischief. They still behave as though the game were not
decided, the battle not fought; we must still reckon with them, but
fundamentally we must cease to fear them any more.[1]
No comments:
Post a Comment