For Wilshire Baptist Church
Sitting at a red light, the man behind me in the blue BMW beeped his horn as soon as the light turned green. Apparently, I wasn’t moving fast enough for him. He eventually zipped around me and raced ahead. I so wanted to scoot in behind him at the next light and provide him with the same guidance. But I didn’t. You never know the mental state of the person in the other car. More than that, I’m too old for these games. Or at least I should be.
When I look in the mirror, I see a 63-year-old man, but the person who lives inside this body feels much younger — somewhere between 20 and 40. I just don’t feel any different from the person I was 20-plus years ago, and that’s dangerous because it puts me at risk of miscalculating my actions, behaviors and comments. It’s one of the main reasons I have to back away from Twitter and Facebook sometimes. The youngster in me wants to toss a bomb and stir things up, but the older-and-wiser man knows that does more harm than good, or much to my embarrassment, doesn’t do anything at all.
Thankfully, my emotional immaturity is kept in check by my growing spiritual maturity. My spiritual maturity knows that loving my neighbor as myself means not acting on my latent childish impulses. The older I get, the more attuned I am to that verse from I Corinthians 13 that we know by heart but perhaps don’t always take to heart: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.” That was Paul speaking boldly about his transformation, but sometimes I still have to translate it this way for my own use: “Now that I am an adult, I need to quit acting like a child.”
I’ve become intrigued in recent years by the way the soul grows older and wiser, and with it, our decision-making processes and our hopes and desires. For example, over the past few years my father would sometimes talk about world events — COVID, gun violence, immigration chaos, political unrest — and he’d say, “I wish God would just go ahead and rapture us all.” He wasn’t kidding, and neither was I when I’d say, “Not so fast. That’s fine for you, but I still have some things I want to do.” And then I’d list some national parks I still want to see; some foreign countries I haven’t visited. But now, after watching him in a hospital ICU unable to do more than squeeze a hand or blink an eye when asked to, I realize he had other things on his agenda. As much as my immature, emotional self wanted him to stay, my maturing spiritual self knew he was already on his way to where he’d long wanted to be.
That’s a good lesson for us youngsters who hold on to this world and all its goodies and power as if it was created just for us. Someday we’ll have to leave it all behind; if we allow our soul to mature, we’ll actually want to. Until then, I still have plenty I want to do – not just for me but for others as well. I just have to make sure my doing those things is not only age appropriate but soul appropriate too.