The Sylvr Pen

This post picks up where the last Grace-Aging post left off. If you haven’t read it, you might want to visit there before reading here…]

It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

-George Eliot

“I’m seventy years old, Lord,” I protested inside my head. “Who starts something really new at this stage of life?”

And back the answers came rattling like hailstones: As I thumbed through my Bible. As I spotted little articles in magazines. As I watched news features and videos online. As I remembered tidbits from biographies I’d read long before but had forgotten about:

Moses.

Caleb.

George Muller.

Grandma Moses.

Peter Mark Roget

Colonel Sanders

Laura Ingalls Wilder—and numerous other writers…

And more…

Here’s a sampling of fascinating facts I learned:

• Moses first took on governmental leadership at age eighty, and led and governed a couple million (often unruly) people until the age of 120.
• Caleb was 85 when he finally got to lead troops in the long postponed battles for the Promised Land. “Give me this mountain,” he said to Joshua. “I’m just as strong as forty-five years ago...”
• George Muller began his world speaking tours at 70—and never missed a scheduled talk, even when heavy fog at sea threatened to prevent one. (He went below deck and briefly prayed for God to lift the fog, and He did, immediately.)
• At 76 Grandma Moses started painting primitives, which suddenly brought her world-wide fame when she was 86.
• Peter Mark Roget invented the thesaurus in his retirement years, published it when he was 73, and kept tweaking it till he died at age 90.
• Laura Ingalls Wilder began writing her Little House books at age 65.
• At that same age Colonel Sanders established his Kentucky Fried Chicken fast food restaurant chain.
• Mary Delaney invented paper collage at age 72.
• Fauja Singh ran his first marathon when he was 89, became the oldest real marathon runner at 100, and even after that continued running seven or eight kilometers on a daily basis.
• And mercy me! Sarah finally gave birth to a baby at over 90.
• And so on… (There’s lots more.)

So my age is no excuse, is it?

Now, what new start might I make?

Need it be flamboyant, grandiose? I don’t think so. We’re just talking an antidote for closed doors, “endings” —the most recent involving avocations and personal “sidelines”. Even some of the above new starts that became great began with little “hobby” kinds of things…

So I ask myself some questions:

• What did I once want to do, but never did?
• What “foolish” pursuits do I idly dream about now?
• What did I once dabble in that I might pursue now in greater depth?
• What catches my fancy as I flip through newspapers and magazines, peruse library bookshelves, watch internet videos, and click links to this and that?

Exploring those questions gains me a mass of answers, and several potential new pursuits. I note them down. I muse about them. I dabble a bit. I do some fact-finding sessions.

By this process I find some novel directions and start experiencing new enjoyments, and my life starts growing more richly blessed.

Then I ask myself another question:

• What’s most important to spend my increasingly precious time on henceforth?

So now I’m also clarifying the idea of balance between the enlivening “fun”  and the weightier, richer, most important pursuits and purposes for this time of life.

In an upcoming Grace-Aging Theme post, I plan to share some of my answers to the questions above. Meanwhile, no matter your age or place in life right now, you might like to consider the questions for yourself. It may be that though your over-full present leaves no room for certain pursuits you’d like to try, they may find a happy home in your future (older) years. And it’s good to plan ahead.

*****

He came home unhappy a week ago, preoccupied with the many things that had gone wrong with the evening. And so he never saw it, sitting there waiting, right at his place.

While he was out, I’d suddenly remembered the “gold-foil”-covered chocolate coins I’d bought to put in the little antique bean pot on Saint Patrick’s Day. It was meant to follow that day’s meal of corned beef, colcannon, and homemade (and slightly underdone) soda bread I’d rushed to fling on the table, last minute, having lost track of time. (Can I blame that DST clock change?) In the flurry I’d forgotten the chocolates.

Now, days later, recalling the pleasure I’d enjoyed from recent surprises and thinking I could bless others with little surprises, too, I remembered this one, still hidden away in an upstairs closet.

“Better late than never,” I figured, and cleaned up the mini-beanpot, poured in the coins, finding they fit just right, and placed this “pot of gold” on the kitchen table, right there on his place mat.

But now he wasn’t even seeing it! His miseries of the evening had stolen his attention–and potential joy.

This grumpy bout was quite unusual. He almost always comes home from his ministry exuberant. I wondered whether he would have noticed in his usual, better mood. Or would his focus been so captivated with the happy events he’d enjoyed that even they would have distracted him just as much?

Maybe.

But what this really made me wonder was if I do the same thing, if I might even have done so the same day, and missed (maybe a lot of) surprises the greatest Lover of my soul had set out ahead of time for me.

It’s easy to get preoccupied. It takes a bit more intentionality to keep alert for the surprises. May this week be one of vibrant awareness—of all the usual blessings and all the special little surprises as well.

*****

Now I lay me down to sleep…”

This prayer now hangs on the wall by my bed. When I came across it in the multi-floored, rambling gift shop, among all the other signs and pictures and home décor, I felt I had to have it. It speaks to me and for me on many levels.

I used to pray it, on my knees, every night when I was a child. At my side my mother sat, overseeing that prayer, and when I came to “If I should die before I wake,” I’m sure she felt that possibility keenly—after a certain point in time, at least, if not before.

You see, I nearly did die. The whole family thought they’d lost me. The doctor later told them that without penicillin, recently brought to the medical forefront, I would not have made it (though I’m sure a lot of earnest prayer rose up to God, as well). My poor mother, who had always wanted a little girl in addition to her two boys, had lost a baby to miscarriage just a couple years before my birth, and I remember her telling me how deeply it affected her. She was sure it was a little girl, because our kindhearted old doctor wouldn’t answer when she asked the gender. And a song the radio often replayed at the time voiced her feelings in the lyrics, “When I lost my baby, I almost lost my mind”—so strongly she hated to hear it.

The girl four doors up the street, just a few years older than I, died from scarlet fever. Other children around the town died from polio. Death was a stark reality, an ever-looming possibility—even for little toddlers who kneel beside beds. This prayer on the wall acknowledged it, and asked for grace in death as well as life, whichever should come in the next twenty-four hours.

Do parents teach their children this prayer anymore? I suppose some do, but their number must be few. I never hear of it. And, admittedly, I don’t think I imparted it to my kids either, for I encouraged self-spoken rather than memorized prayers. But whether in prayers from memory or spontaneity, how many of us encourage our children to pray about their deaths—except for God to keep them from experiencing it?

We cannot, however, be kept from it. Barring Christ’s return beforehand, we will all die—and we cannot know when. But something in our culture seems to have inculcated in us a vague denial of that truth. Or avoidance of it.

This is most unfortunate.

For we need Christ in both life and death. And to experience Resurrection, we must first experience death.

This weekend focuses on both Christ’s Death and Resurrection. What a good time to talk about both to our young ones, and share what 1 Corinthians 15:20-26, 35-40, 42-44… says, in words and object lessons they can understand, like showing them the daffodil bulb we bury and the daffodil in bloom! What a good time to impart our hope: that though “it is appointed unto all people once to die…” that Jesus Christ led the way for all of us who follow Him, to also be resurrected to a better life forever.

He couldn’t be resurrected if He didn’t die.

We can’t be resurrected if we don’t die.

This is the beauty and hope in death: the provision of His presence in it, all the while we “sleep,” and our final glorious and joyful Resurrection from it, forever made shiny clean and new, and forever after ALIVE.

Ah, spring! Around here when the sun breaks out for hours, after all that northern winter gray, you see people smiling wherever you go. Golden light bathes everything, newly arrived birds are singing, the breeze blows fresh and sweet.

Why then, in that time some years ago, did the blues come and visit and drag me down in springtime? It didn’t make sense (I thought). Nothing was going wrong in my life.

Then I read the chapter on “seasonal blues” in Getting Up When You’re Feeling Down, by Harriet Braiker, and suddenly my springtime blues made perfect sense.

Words there prodded me to survey my past to see if some event(s) had happened in spring that might make me subconsciously connect it with loss, endings, trauma, or mourning. Suddenly I realized that for me Spring had become my “Time of Many Endings.”

Of course there were the predictable and even planned endings. School always ended then—yearly, when I taught, more permanently when I retired, and later when homeschooling closed with the graduation of our youngest. But what a list of other endings I started realizing—and some of them neither expected nor happy!

My mother died in spring. My youngest son took a campus job in his second college spring, ending summers at home. He married in spring, fixing the emptiness of the nest more firmly. And, come to think of it, it had been spring when that lawyer had come bounding jauntily up my front steps bearing my final divorce decree: huge elaborate document that dwarfed my marriage certificate, college degree, and permanent teaching certification, all put together!

Hand-delivering the thing he was, and peering into the house he knew I had to vacate, eyeing it up (I came to believe) as potential office site for his law firm. (They bought it later, cheap). At that time my one-year substituting job also came to an end, with no fresh job prospects, or place to move to, and a car so rusty it wouldn’t pass state inspection and wasn’t worth the money to repair, if I’d had it.

More recent springtime endings then came rushing back to my remembrance: How it was on Mother’s Day that same aforementioned son found himself facing divorce himself. It was spring when a bad church situation compelled my husband and me to leave, ending our ministries there (three for me, actually), our church social network, and sure publication and promotion of a book I’d written. It was also spring that brought news of a horrific death in the family, and of secret horrific abuse that had led to it.

There was more, I was sure, if I wracked my brain, but who needed more?

The point was that if I were going to clamber out of the Springtime Blues, I had some work to do.

What work?

Well, if the problem was endings, the antidote would be new beginnings, right? I needed to change spring from being a time of endings to one of new beginnings.

I thought back to when my nest had abruptly emptied after homeschooling fullness. Seeing the blues potential beforehand then, I’d headed it off at the pass with travel plans for which I now had the freedom, and filled up my days with people visits and new projects, or old ones begun previously but laid aside because “too busy.”

How well that had helped! So I used the same tactic on the Springtime Endings Blues—to similar happy effect!

But what about now, at this “winter season” of life? Make new beginnings even now? Can people do such things? I wondered. Can I?…  Isn’t it too late?…

(continued next “Themesday,” aka Thursday, for the answers I’ve gotten, and the new avenues they’ve opened.)

It has long been my routine—even habit—to journal five gratitudes daily. Recently I began recording them as “gifts,” and then selected from the five “The Gift of the Day.” Seeing the FMF prompt word this week was “surprise,” I realized how often surprises have popped up before me lately, making me halt, note and reflect, usually smile, often even laugh—out loud—things I could consider “surprises from God.” And I began wondering if each day might hold a special surprise.

Drawing back a sun-warmed curtain one recent morning to behold a silver coating of heavy frost spread over all the grass beyond… Another day to suddenly behold unexpected fog or an amazing sunrise at its peak… Yesterday as I perched on the stool in my craft room, I was surprised by the crisp clear sound of yet another new bird song, unseen outside behind my back. (Third unaccustomed one this month, and the early spring kind—quite different from the winter calls or silence)… The day before, the friend I haven’t seen in ages appearing before me at one store’s entrance where we exchanged happy words and memories and a warm hug—and then again in another parking lot, both leaving a different store… The times the Bible has fallen open to exactly the answer I needed to the question I’d been just before bringing to God… I suppose even drawing back a curtain to be confronted by a wasp I nearly put my hand on is a surprise to note; nothing delightful, but a “happenstance” with a possible parable to consider before charging into a day of action I hadn’t run past God first.

Lots of surprises. Maybe even one each day?

I think in the week ahead I’ll keep a lookout. If I don’t, it could just be that surprises will happen that I rush right past and don’t see, or don’t notice because I’m looking down rather than up. And then I’ll start recording surprises also, maybe even a daily “Surprise of the Day.”

Join me?