Slipping, Sputtering and Aging

Our mental gearing sputters and slips as we age. Things get muddled. A skinny old lady I know confuses the words genealogist and gynecologist. Granted they’re similar---one looks up your history and one looks up your...

A long life history gets condensed. “It’s from that great little store in the mall,” my 88-year-old Mother in law says.  “We used to pop in there all the time!”  She hands me the battery charger and has me read the product logo---Radio Shack. I inform her that Radio Shack has gone the way of the dinosaur.  Age old events merge with events from last week.

Time-lines shrink so there is only what was and what is---and they connect. A vacation taken thirty years ago is recounted like it was last week. Last week’s adventures have dropped off the time-line altogether. Whatever grey matter tethers time to memory dissipates.  The belts slip maybe or connections misfire.

RAM is disrupted. Roughly 40 per cent of people over the age of 65 experience some form of memory loss. Oddly enough professionals say this isn’t an issue unless you don’t think it’s an issue.  Being cognizant of loss is good. 

“Unfortunately, in most cases, there are no obvious signs a timing belt is near death; it will just break.” For cars you replace the belt before it blows.  We just fray. Experts say routine helps.  An investment in life helps. Both body and brain strengthening exercises.  Then the last seconds; power doesn’t come, engine seizes, body stops with a jar as hitting a wall. Cam, crankshaft collapse. “Furthermore, men are afraid of a high place and terrors on the road…For man goes to his eternal home while mourners go about in the street.”

Dreams, Goals, Shot Glasses and Shakespeare

She spun the glass in small circles. Amber fluid, amber table, amber lighting. He lifts his glass to his lips; less to drink than to think. Sets it down. His heavy mug, her petite shot-glass. He leans in. The band plays the bridge.

“Do you dream?” he asked. 

  

“Not much I remember. Mostly black and white.”

“Daydream?  If we weren’t here…Where’d you want to be? If you could be…”

Her turn to drink. “You gonna eat those fries, mister?” Eating the fry like a professor using a smoking pipe. “Don’t know. Travel, teach….” Shoulder shrug. “The business, the bills…You? Why?”

“It’s just; there’s gotta be more! The poets and the Instagram people; Acuff, Goff. Different leages? Different card hands?” Speaking of hands; raises his, flags down the waitress. Downs his drink.

“Before this,” she takes a long swallow. “Before this I thought I’d save the world. Make a dent. But it’s hardly a dent. Maybe a ping; if that’s a thing.”

“I think it’s Shakespeare, “The pings a thing to catch a king.” She rolls her eyes. “So if God’s as big as we say; what if?  Is this it?  Should there be an ‘after this?’ Or a ‘during this?’ If so; then what?”

“So does more...?,” her voice trails off. “What does more look like? Is it inside us?  Outside?” She stretches her legs out straight, leans back into the chair. A horn honks in the street. The band plays a new set; saxophone heavy.

“Maybe we’re to constrained; to adult, to serious,” she says. “What if we stretched…? He raises his eyebrows. “Stretched one thing, risked one thing towards dreaming this week?  Worst case…more hop in our step. So? What’s your goal?”

“Stay alive. Then; I don’t know.  Is praying a step?”

“I think so,” she said.  “As long as you’re moving.  Standing still’s not a step.  Unless you’re listening---then it's a step.”

“Praying’s my step then.  Yours?”

“I’m going to research world-changing agencies!  I’ll share Tuesday!”

“Til Tuesday then,” he says stepping outside with a small hop in his step.

Straw Men and Image Bearers

"The easiest thing to do is throw a rock. It's a lot harder to create a stained glass window."...Jon Foreman, Switchfoot

Straw men garner all our attention. Easier to argue with the label on the lapel than the flesh and bone man inside it. Christian, gay, liberal, Nazi, white, black, homeless we categorize each other. Blind to the Imago Dei; the image of God in you I see myself as a little god and strip you of your humanity. No matter who you are. No matter what you say. Both the transient and the man living at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

I have more rules about people than Seinfeld. I judge on the image presented instead of image innate. Seeing all people as image bearers means constant reorienting. My prejudice submits. I consider you more important than myself. When we disagree I don’t call you names.  I seek to understand your point of view.

Baptist theologian James Leo Garrett offered a good rule of thumb: “Until you can state your opponent’s view so well that he himself says, `Yes, that’s what I believe,’ you aren’t ready to debate him.” That takes work and a willingness to listen. More difficult still a willingness to change, or adjust, your view. Its easier to mouth mantras spoon fed to us. Having a different view doesn’t make you less human.

Where to begin? The people across the street with the ‘vote no’ on my yes issue? The coworker that baits me with political talk? The unfortunate that I exchange nods with down by the river? It starts where I live. Extends to wherever I go. All people are created in God's image. There’s a parable like that. Turns out everybody’s my neighbor.

In The Waiting And The Hoping

Putting life on hold for seven years is a death sentence when you’re fifteen. “So Jacob served seven years for Rachel….” Hope is tied to waiting. We wait because we expect an outcome. We save money (hoping). We exercise (hoping). We do chemotherapy (hoping). Jacob waits (expecting).

Probabilities differ. The outcome isn’t assured---hence hope. Money into stocks is a safe bet. She’ll get pregnant. You’ll get hired. Nobody’s hiring. Housing market implodes. Baby doesn’t come. The cancer doesn’t go into remission. Jacob had the sure bet, right? 

Waiting is wired into process. The process has purpose. We want instant. Character grows in the waiting. Jacob for Rachel, Israel for the promised land, mother for baby, the new car, the retirement. In the waiting God is working.

“Put your hope in the Lord,” is a continuous cry in the book of Psalms. In the desire, in the stretching, in the asking, during the doubting this is what God longs for.

The sweetness of the prize colors the waiting.  Jacob opens his eyes in the morning and... it’s Leah!  Laban lies!  Jacob agrees to work seven more for Rachel. One could grow angry and bitter in such circumstances. Yet the story says that it was to Jacob as a few days because of his love for Rachel. How sweet is our prize?

In difficult days and long seasons let’s check our hearts.  Are we hoping in God? Is our prize worth it? Changed for better or becoming caustic? Morning light may startle us with different realities.  With eyes on the prize we’ll look back and see. Our waiting was but a few days.

Burning Bushes, Revival And Rest

Vacation week couldn’t come fast enough. I arrive at this week tired of working.  Tired of people.  Tired of me being tired of people. Tired of all the little things that bug me when they shouldn’t.  But they do. Road-tripping to Utah. Leaving humid beach-cold for dry summer hot. Hoping God would speak. Looking for revival.

No burning bushes. In red rocks, in rushing water, slot-canyons and slick sandstone God’s work is evident. My soul finds rest in nature as always. Replenished joy in desert driving; long talks with the wife. Coming alive through stair-stepping hikes and slow-river walks on slippery rocks upstream. Heat feeling good. Invigorated but not energized for work; for people, for little-foxes that spoil the vines.

Home through arid one-grey-colored desert to attend the sons’ Indian-themed engagement party. To see on my newsfeed that Anthony Bourdain is dead. A post on Facebook tells me cancer took a high-school friend. The miracle of dating; the dire end of depression.

My father had his dark days. He once told me that sunrises motivated him to live. I am fortunate to delight in sunsets (sunrises come too early) and the glories of nature. Laughing with family and friends is a well of the purest water for me. This confluence wets my tongue for more of life.  No burning bush?  Perhaps the fire was there all along.

This Ache For Home (This Is A Far Country)

You might say it was just a house. I saw it as hope for life-long connection; for community. We bought it with the hope of first marriage; the efflorescence of daughter. I put in sprinklers and planted a little lawn. Walked to school with the five-year old. Got a dog; black and white Australian Shepherd, Collie mutt. The neighbors from around the corner brought over cookies.  The neighbor next door complained about the dog. The grass grew; daughter too.

We had birthday parties in the backyard; Spongebob Squarepants and reptile themed. Invited the cookie-givers children; all three. The daughter played with two boys from down the street that brought their parents. Summer days we’d pull up the cheap plastic chairs and chat in each other’s backyards.  In my heart I thought I’d found it---constancy, Americana, neighborhood, a place of permanence.  I was wrong.

It all frayed at once.  The threadbare marriage showed jagged tears.  The two boys houses down moved North with their parents. A kindred had formed with the cookie clan but job loss here meant a new job elsewhere. With the marriage barely intact Providence thrust us out of the house, out of the area and into a place we did not know.

So it goes. This hunger for permanence and place remains. A perceptible ache that is always there below the surface.  This ache for home; for that far country. For we wander “in deserts and mountains and caves and holes in the ground,” til we finally, God willing, come home.

Stagnation Is Easy. Satisfaction Takes Work

“One does not surrender a life in an instant - that which is lifelong can only be surrendered in a lifetime.” --- Jim Eliott

“In the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.” ― Jack Kerouac

The mountain top and the therapists chair are lonely places. Places where baggage is left behind or stripped away. That avocado green Tourister with the extendable handle and Teflon wheels for instance. The angry self-protectiveness that stems from---where?  The crowd isn’t clamoring to give up the perception of safety. Not hungry enough or hurting enough.

The lie is this; satisfaction will come easy. A glimpse of a thing is not the thing itself. The river is beautiful seen from valley’s edge, but you can’t taste it.  Beautiful but it won’t slake your thirst, clean your face, soothe your feet, shake you awake. Have we always been so naive?  Feeling ‘in love’ isn’t the core of marriage; spilling semen isn’t sex. Rendered skin deep we call it beauty.

Time and self are difficult to give up. Deepening relationship requires both. Stagnation is easy. For now the mountain is a picture on your desktop. Personal growth hurts and leaves hollow. Reward seems nebulous.

We commit to the not-yet tangible. Remind ourselves. Short ascents where we push hard, feel shale and smell pine. At home we’re willing to have those deep, tough talks; play and wine with the mate. We do the difficult work. Sit in the lonely places. Listen in the lonely places. Stagnation is easy; satisfaction takes work.

“In a sense everything that is exists to climb. All evolution is a climbing towards a higher form. Climbing for life as it reaches towards the consciousness, towards the spirit. We have always honored the high places because we sense them to be the homes of gods. In the mountains there is the promise of… something unexplainable. A higher place of awareness, a spirit that soars. So we climb… and in climbing there is more than a metaphor; there is a means of discovery.” ― Rob Parker

Swimming

We swim in an alien atmosphere. I remember early voyages. Passing through a white, steel gate; walking down a narrow corridor you smell it. Chlorine saturated water steams from wet cement. An adult beckons; parents push. The first step into clear blue water; foot feeling the tension as it breaks the surface, then the other.  Oh, the cold!

I’m not comfortable entering a pool.  My asthmatic lungs seize up with quick temperature change. I can barely breathe. I’m leaving the safety of air and firm footing. One step down; bathing suit gets wet and heavy. Two steps down then hold to the side, hold to the side! 

Grasping tight the pool’s edge over there is a pile of rectangles; like tops from Styrofoam ice-boxes. Bright colors; cherry red and cobalt blue with corners cut-off. For what purpose?

Inside the pool a line of children hold to the edge. An adult towers over us in a red bathing suit. “Pretend you’re in a big bathtub.  Face down and blow bubbles.” Easy. Each is given an ice-box cover. Trembling and terror, we leave the side. Grasping kick-boards we shove out across the shallow end a line of stick men without arms.

The new house has a pool. Neighbor girls hurl us into cold water. The sink-or-swim school. Dog paddles stave off drowning. Paddles turn to superior strokes. What was fearful now’s freedom.  Summer days spent swimming til cool water constricts blood vessels. We turn purple.

We swim in an alien atmosphere. The sink-or-swim school. Bright colors bid us leave the shallow end to the scary deep. Perhaps freedom awaits!

Guilt Is The Thing Missing From The New Testament

The two-a.m. terrors came again last night.  An hour-long window when I’m awake but not energized.  Flashbacks come in that window.  People I’ve hurt long ago.  Venom I spewed not meaning to poison. The poem I wrote to manipulate the girl. The what-ifs run right along pressing in with tangible weight. Palpable pressure in the chest.

Guilt is the thing missing in the New Testament. Peter does not refer to his big blunders. Paul doesn’t apologize for holding coats to give stoners of Stephen better elbow snap. No 12-step program; no making amends to all he’d harmed. Paul’s perfectly Jewish without the guilt!  It’s as though those things have all been set right.  Trajectory changed; no skeletons in the closet. What sets them free?  What’s the skeleton key?

“…But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”  Knowing Christ matters.  Past sins, what-ifs, should-have and shouldn’t have’s out with the trash.  Yes, we make amends.  We seek peace. The past is a place we’ve left; Christ is the future we have.  We live here.  Rejoice in an all sufficient Christ in the present. Those dead skeletons; crucified and buried with Christ.  That’s the truth but not the experience.

Like buried hearts in a horror story they beat their way back. Try fight them off with denial, the fact is we are guilty.  As Spurgeon has said, “Your sins are so gone that they cannot be laid to your charge.” This is what Paul and Peter understood. Cry to God and fight. Cling to what is now a clean slate. Skeletons of the past will reach out to grab hold. Look forward to the future. The refrain is true; the cross has the final word.

The Cabinet Keeper

The stubble on his face was razor sharp.  Not his memory.  That was growing soft---not growing really but diminishing. He couldn’t remember what he didn’t remember. Wasn’t sure that what he recalled was ten years ago or ten minutes. Frustrating. He didn’t mean to lash out in anger. Irritation comes as he tries to tether to the old memories and connect with the new.  The rope keeps unraveling before he can tie it all together. Hair and memory both graying out.

 My sister and I have shared the same moments…and we have different memories.  I can access complete experiences if I see a picture. Blocks of my childhood are absent along with chunks through my twenties.  A snapshot or a story will open those files—sometimes. Raising my daughter; full soundtracks and photos filling my personal memory cloud. My brain has archived trillions of tidbits; rock and roll lyrics, Monty Python skits, facts about writers; quotes and quirks—all easily accessed.

Memories are stored in the brain in multiple file cabinets; back of brain, front of brain.  Current events we toss into the back brain cabinet (hippocampus). After a while we give it a manila folder. Every ten years the files are shuttled to front brain storage (frontal cortex). Simple.  Unless there’s a disruption. There’s always a disruption. Current memory must be reinforced; the little file cabinet guy must scribble onto that folder. The folder properly placed in context. To retrieve it the incoming query must be clearly understood; “Okay, brain, find me the actors in eighties movie files.” Over time the little file cabinet keeper gets tired and just throws those memories into a box.

It came time to move him to smaller quarters, the movers were oblivious, the children miffed and mystified. The ‘new’ boxes in den and kitchen were filled with Hammacher Schlemmer catalogs, Hollywood Bowl librettos, miscellaneous mail along with important letters from the IRS, postcards from friends abroad and medical bills. The boxes in the backrooms were neatly organized; photos of grandchildren and family, notes from mom, lists of knick-knacks, tools and finances to be distributed ‘when the time comes.’ Temporary amusements and current finances not held tightly; not filed rightly.  Kinships and clan, close connected friends and things done by hand---these the keeper stores in the strong room.