OLD…er
Was thinking this morning about getting old…er. I do a lot more of that these days. COVID quarantine has offered lots of time to stare at our navels…if we can find ours with the added COVID pounds hanging around there.
Living for three score and ten (not the Gettysburg thing but the Biblical life allotment), I’ve seen a lot. I was born four years after WW II ended…the last year of the 1940’s. That sounds really old. I grew up during the cold war all the time fearing the end of the world in nuclear war. We had the drills at school getting under our desks…like that was going to protect us. Fallout Shelters became the thing. We saw the yellow and black signs on many public buildings. I even worked for the Corps of Engineers the summer of 1970 surveying buildings in Iowa for potential fallout shelters. Don’t see those signs any longer.
I’ve lived through the Korean and Viet Nam wars…Viet Nam being the first to be televised in our faces on the evening news. I was around for the assassination of president Kennedy. I lived though 1968 when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. As a sophomore in college I wondered if the world I had known would be there by the time I graduated. I’ve been around for the explosion of the space shuttle, 9/11 and now a pandemic and January 6, 2021…to name a few others. These events are filed away as horrific.
But then there are the personal times throughout life where I’ve been betrayed, maligned or abandoned by people I thought were my friends, even family. I have lived with, worked with and had friendships for a time with mean, selfish narcissist people. My own father was a NPD. I’ve been drug through a false lawsuit that was ultimately dismissed after over two years of drudgery. Lies, meanness, and distortions of truth abundantly flowed.
with Barbara Johnson in her home in LaHabra, California
So the idea that you can reach a point in life where you might be tempted to be a bit cynical, crotchety or just flat mean yourself, I get it. Barbara Johnson, the author, Word Publishing ‘cash cow’ (besides the millions of books she sold there were Barbara Johnson/Spatula coffee cups, calendars, etc) and Women of Faith Tour speaker…was a good friend. We met in 1985 at San Francisco State University and remained friends until she passed away. We’d often talk on the phone at the end of the week about the situations we’d heard about that week and at the end of our conversation more than once Barb would close with “well, life’s a bitch and then you die”, joking, she was joking…sort of. I’d ask if she said that from the stage when she was speaking to the 20,000 Christian women at those conferences. She’d say, well maybe not quite in those words. As a Baptist layperson and in her Spatula Ministry Barbara heard 1000s of stories from broken hearted moms—and dads. She was one of my own primary cheer leaders in my work, particularly the AIDS. When in 1999 I felt I was slipping off the rails and decided to go for intensive counseling in Arizona, she and Bill sent a generous check to help.
I’m just sayin’, to have lived a life as a social worker, serving those troubled by multiple situations in their lives, working with those others saw as misfits…or worse, as scum and human trash—took something out of me…but it gave me more. In working with gays and lesbians, then too with HIV/AIDS, I got calls and letters telling me I was in the way of God’s judgment in helping and that I too would go to hell.
I have the emotional scars of years of not just seeing…but experiencing the under belly of humanity, I’m not speaking of those I was serving but the judgmental, self centered, self righteous that too often sat in the pew on Sunday nearby. Is that language too strong? Well, then you’ve not been where I’ve been. But you then see that to remain optimistic about humanity, to maintain my hope for the future, to believe that my God has got this…and it is ultimately going somewhere good—takes a source, a force way beyond myself.
Life is hard…not totally. It is difficult..not totally. I too at times in my exhaustion and disillusionment slip into meanness…but God has not allowed me to stay there. A large postcard on my file cabinet just beyond my laptop says, “If you’re going through hell, keep going”. Another of my favorite quote is “Religion is for people afraid of going to hell, spirituality is for those who’ve been there”. So true.
I’ve come to see that when you walk at the side of those hurting and in deep pain, we carry some of that pain too. That is what empathy is. That is what love is. That is what being really connected in this life is. You do not have to go far to find someone who is hurting. Lives are often too busy, too full of stuff and entertaining distractions to pay attention to the aches of those close by. My eyes have been open, often blurry with tears.
So I really am a cry baby as my father repeatedly said…and today, I am proud of it. It’s one way of bearing the pains of others. Having cheer leaders like Barb is another. Finding balance, pulling aside for a time took awhile to learn. I’m still not doing do it perfectly.
Yet, I refuse to be a crotchety, cynical, bitchy old man. I’ve seen enough of the goodness of mankind…and the goodness of God herself…come on God is all that is masculine, and all that is feminine. As the decades have gone by, my God has gotten bigger…no God-box any longer. The vastness and the mystery of all that He is surrounds me…so I will not let the darkness take hold. Oh, I see it, I know it will always be there, but I have driven my stakes, pitched my tent in God’s camp.
This is going somewhere GOOD.
February 2021