Under the Party Tree

IC XC
✙
NI KA

להגיע לבן חמישים ותשע זה דומה לבן עשרים ותשע רק שלושים שנה מוחר יותר

REACHING FIFTY NINE today is a bit of a surprise. I’m not surprised that I have lived this long, only that I have lived this long already. I’ve passed the halfway mark to Eleventy One, but it feels remarkably short.

About all I can say is mistakes were made but somehow God’s grace has brought me here. I preached on Sunday on St Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthians, 1 Cor 15:1-11, in which, in part, Saul recounts his persecution of the Church and then says, “For I am the least of the apostles, who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain.” Confessing the resurrection of Jesus makes us all apostles of his resurrection to the world. That turns our entire life into a mission. Mistakes were made but by God’s grace, I can be here to preach to you, or at least write a blog post about preaching, or perhaps to use writing to reach you.

59 is similar to 29 except it’s 30 years later. It’s the cusp of some new phase of life. In this case, it’s the cusp of old age. Yesterday I woke up and the first thought, after Modeh Ani, was “Man lives but three score years and ten, if he be in strength, mayhap four score years, and most of these are toil and pain.” Welp, I said, ten more years. Saturn has been around the sun twice since I was born. It might make it halfway around again… or I could die tomorrow. Or later today, even.

I no longer have the privilege of thinking everybody hates me. Nor even the privilege of thinking nobody knows me. I am blessed with family, friends, and people who trust me to do important things. I know I have people praying for me, and people who are invested in my well-being. Additionally, I have people for whom all of that is true of them on my behalf: I am their friend, mentor, employer, person to whom they look for their well-being, at least in part. I never expected to be an adult, yet here I am.

Finally, in spite of my better attempts at sabotaging myself, I seem to have discovered fatherhood. By that, I mean leadership, mentorhood, protector-ness, and needing to at least appear fearless. And the odd thing is that after trying to look that way for a while – and pray that way – that seems to be becoming true. I find myself walking into situations fearlessly. This is largely in part due to God’s grace, and my therapist. You need to cooperate with both or they don’t work.

Things I wanted in my twenties and thirties are completely anathema to me now. In fact, I would not know what to do with them if I got them. I never got them. That is also an action of God’s grace.

Some things I never thought possible have been. More grace.

But the biggest surprise has been what I’ve been praying for. I find myself asking God for things i never wanted, or never let myself admit to wanting. St Augustine was famous for asking God for virtue, “but not yet”. I’ve found myself asking God for “yesterday, if not sooner.” I wish I could have prayed like this 30 years ago.

But Paul is right. And so are Rascal Flats. The road I took has become the road God used to get me here. There is no other way for me to have gotten here, no other God I can know, no other revelation, this is where Jesus meets me.