Dan's Thoughts

Trish # 52

I like Charles Green. He came to speak at Christ Church for our Pentecost celebration. Trish and I were talking about him yesterday morning.

“He’s seventy nine years old!” I said to her.

I was impressed by Pastor Green’s age. I am fifty-two, you see. I now know that to some extent at least, one chooses how one ages. Life started asking me a while back if I was ready to get old. Little voices started whispering things like, “shouldn’t you change the way you walk, slumped and slow like? How about raging against new technology, you could talk constantly about how all the old stuff was better? Why don’t you start imagining what it will feel like to be over the hill and begin practicing now? Maybe you can work a few comments into your conversation with friends about your aches and pains; sigh or moan every once in a while?" I have not been exactly sure about how to answer these little voices. Most of the time I can ignore them but then they start getting more insistent.

Then Charles Green comes along, telling us how he wrecked his Harley Davidson a few months ago. He says he took a turn too sharply, hit a ditch and went flying over the handlebars. “I broke a rib!” he says as he laughs with an unmistakable smirk of pride.

“What did you think about as you went flying through the air?” someone asked. “Well, I went into slow motion,” he replied. “I remember clearly everything I thought and experienced while I was up in the air, flying toward the ground. Mostly, I was thinking, ‘what is a seventy-nine year old man doing riding a Harley Davidson?”

Maybe he’s telling the truth. Maybe that is what he was thinking. But if so, he seems not to have listened very well to the voice of reason. He plans to keep riding his bike!

Why?

“So I won’t wake up the morning of my eighty-fifth birthday and regret that I didn’t ride my motorcycle,” he says.

He arrived in Nashville a day after his wife. When he tried to check in the hotel, the receptionist called up to her room. “There’s a man here at the front desk wanting to know your room number. He claims to be your husband.”

“Send him on up!” she said with enough enthusiasm to embarrass the guys from our church who were helping them get their luggage situated. So his wife, Barbara, is no more reasonable or settled than he!

It’s obvious that the Greens have kept delaying old age. They must have heard the same voices I was talking about. They said, “no thanks” to walking slow, moaning, complaining and playing it safe. “Maybe we’ll get old sometime but not yet!” they seem to shout. They have been saying, “yes” to life, fun, vitality and health.

It shows.

When you come through a season like Trish and I have faced, voices can whisper that it is time to start opting out of life. For a while last summer, Trish looked and felt like a very old woman. A bomb had gone off in her head that blew her youth, fun and games and nearly life itself out the window. Naturally, life slowed down for me too. I had to walk slowly when I walked with her. I watched her pain and suffering until her pain filled my own insides. For weeks we ate in a special cafeteria where most people required assistance to get their food into their mouths. The room was filled with the sounds of hacking and groans. Real appetizing stuff! After a few months of this, your level of vitality and joy can just ebb away. If you’re not careful, you can decide to go ahead and think of life in the past tense.

Trish is one of the most courageous people I have ever known. From the day she awoke from her coma until now she has resisted death. She has fought everyday to regain and to retain her life. She has faithfully done all the exercises her therapists have asked her to do. She constantly asks me to watch her walk, to let her know if she is walking strangely or like an old woman. She made herself read again when she barely had enough attention span to follow a simple conversation. She has pursued life like a hunter. She has just refused to quit.

Pentecost is our yearly reminder that vitality is a renewable resource. It reminds us that individuals and churches can decide not to be old and decrepit. Unfortunately, churches, like individuals, often do choose to get old. They say “no” to young leaders, “no” to new expressions of music and spiritual instruction, and “no” to the outside world. But Jesus said that in His kingdom, old and new things would work together. That way, people and churches could “renew their youth like eagles,” as they accumulate wisdom and experience.

Last summer, when Trish had just begun to talk a little, I told her that I had a plan. “Let's live together until we get real old," I said. “Let’s live way up in our nineties. Then, when we die, lets die at the same time.” I then suggested a way that we could die together. I would tell you what it is but I really don’t have a way of putting it delicately enough for a church email. I can tell you it involves “being in one mind and one accord!”

She thought for a while, smiled at me and said, “That would embarrass our children. But it’s a good plan. Lets go for it!”

Unless the Lord returns in our lifetime, we will all die. I know that. But if we are going to die anyway, why should we tell a seventy-nine year old man not to ride his motorcycle? Would it be better for him to die crossing the street on a walker or choking on his oatmeal? No! I’m with Charles Green. Go with the Harley!

All in all though, I like the plan Trish and I have better. For now though, we have to train for that marathon!

Dan