I recently read an article with the longest headline I’ve ever seen: “The people who age the best aren’t the ones who fought hardest against getting older, they’re the ones who, somewhere in their late fifties, quietly made peace with becoming a person their twenty-year-old self wouldn’t fully recognize, and stopped apologizing for it.” The article says just what its headline reports, but it includes an insight I found relevant, whatever our season in life.

Lewis Sherrill’s The Struggle of the Soul focuses on the different stages through which we progress in life, identifying “simplification” as the season of older age in which we determine what matters most and center on it. The article on aging described the psychology behind this focus as “socioemotional selectivity theory.” Developed at Stanford in the 1990s, it notes:

As people perceive their time horizon shortening, they do not simply become more anxious. They become more selective. They prune. They prioritize emotionally meaningful relationships over instrumental ones. They stop investing in social currency they no longer need.

Does such “selectivity” appeal to you today? There’s a reason for that, and a practical path into such meaning. In fact, the two are the same.

“My times are in your hand”

Meteorologists are warning that Tropical Storm Bertha could bring heavy rainfall and flooding to parts of the Gulf Coast in the coming days. This threat is just one example of human mortality in the news. From nine mass shootings that left nine people dead last weekend, to a ferry capsizing in Guyana that killed at least fifty-three people, to a fire captain and his wife and three sons who were found dead after a flash flood in a Utah canyon, each day’s news brings new reasons to fear the future.

But there is another way to look at our finitude and frailty.

In Psalm 31, David describes his “affliction,” the “distress” of his soul, and his “grief” over the fact that “my life is spent with sorrow” and he has “become like a broken vessel” (vv. 7–12). But rather than give in to despair, he prays, “I trust in you, O Lᴏʀᴅ; I say, ‘You are my God.’ My times are in your hand” (vv. 14–15). Accordingly, he can close his psalm by encouraging us to “be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the Lᴏʀᴅ!” (v. 24).

When I doubt whether I can pray in hard times with such reliance on God, I remember the day I saw David’s psalm come to life. A very dear friend and mentor was in the hospital for tests. My wife and I were with him and his wife when the doctors informed him that he had a cancer of the blood and would need to be admitted that day to begin treatments they hoped would save his life.

The doctors left, and my friend turned to us. Rather than focus on the fear we all felt, he smiled and said simply, “Well, my times are in his hands.”

If he could speak these words then, I can speak them today. So can you.

“Then you will find out the use of the world”

The nineteenth-century poet John Keats wrote,

The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is “a vale of tears” from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven—What a little circumscribed straightened notion! Call the world if you please “The vale of Soul-making.” Then you will find out the use of the world.

Later he added, “Do you not see how necessary a world of Pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”

Michelangelo carved his iconic statue of David not by shaping marble into his image but by carving away everything that did not look like David until he was revealed from within the stone. Jesus is doing the same with us, working to make us like himself by removing “the dross from the silver” (Proverbs 25:4) and purifying all our “impurities” (Isaiah 1:25 NIV).

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis described this process metaphorically:

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what he is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense.

What on earth is he up to? The explanation is that he is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but he is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it himself.

Turning a “tin soldier into a live man”

When our “times are in his hands,” every moment of every day becomes an instrument by which our Lord shapes us into his character and manifests himself through us in the world. When we simplify our lives to knowing Jesus and making him known, the pain of our mortality becomes a platform for trusting his providence and depending on his omnipotence. Our fears become invitations to faith and his “power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

As Lewis explained, Jesus is working “to turn you into the same kind of thing as himself . . . beginning to turn the tin soldier into a live man. The part of you that does not like it is the part that is still tin.”

What “tin” will you trust to your Savior today?

NOTE: For more on today’s theme, please see my latest website article, “Wondering if cyclosporiasis is in my future.”

Quote for the day:

“The unwounded life bears no resemblance to the Rabbi.” —Brennan Manning

Our latest website resources:

• Hamas elects new leader: What to expect from Khalil al-Hayya
• NEEDTOBREATHE’s “Last Drink” and a life of Spirit-filled joy
• What makes a hero? A Christian review of “The Odyssey”
• Lindsey Graham dies, Charlie Kirk hearing, Trump’s address, RIP Sam Neill & World Cup Final
• Thomas Jefferson’s childhood home lists for $17 million

http://www.denisonforum.org/

The World Cup, the Open, Iran, and the path to transforming joy

Let’s begin with good news from the weekend: JD and Usha Vance on Sunday announced the birth of their fourth child, the first baby born to a sitting US vice president in more than 150 years. Alec Neel Vance joins his older siblings Ewan, 9; Vivek, 6; and Mirabel, 4.

Next, we’ll pivot to weekend news that is good for some more than others:

• Spain won the World Cup by defeating Argentina 1–0 in extra time.
• Ryan Fox won his first major golf championship when he drained a birdie putt on the 18th hole to win the 2026 Open Championship in England.
• Andy Burnham becomes Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade today.
• The FDA on Sunday retracted its statement linking Taylor Farms to the cyclospora outbreak, reporting that its earlier lab result was a false positive.

And there was terrible news as well: The Pentagon said Sunday that a third member of the American military had died. The soldier was killed in northern Iraq during the disposal of a downed Iranian attack drone. On Friday, two soldiers were killed in an Iranian missile barrage in Jordan that left another soldier missing. Remains recovered on Sunday were believed to be those of the missing soldier.

The US is responding with a new round of airstrikes this morning in Iran, focusing on a northwestern city believed to be home to underground missile bases. Iran, in turn, launched an attack targeting Bahrain, the home of the US Navy’s 5th Fleet, and Kuwait.

You probably wish I had left the last two paragraphs out of today’s article. I wish I could have as well. But there’s a way of reframing bad news that redeems the secular for the spiritual and the temporal for the eternal.

“A joy that has passed through sorrow”

An article from the Worldview Bulletin Newsletter was in my inbox when I began work this morning. Written by Presbyterian pastor and theologian Thiago Silva, it focuses on what J. R. R. Tolkien called eucatastrophy.

According to Silva, the famed British writer coined the word “to describe the sudden, unexpected turn toward joy that occurs at the darkest moment of a story.” It combines catastrophe, a word for disaster, with the prefix eu, meaning good. However, as Silva notes,

This goodness does not cancel the catastrophe that precedes it. A eucatastrophe is not a clever escape hatch or a narrative shortcut. The danger was real. The loss mattered. The sorrow was not imagined or exaggerated. And yet, precisely when everything seems beyond repair, hope breaks in, not as something forced or sentimental, but as something fitting and deeply true. The joy feels undeserved, even shocking, and that is precisely why it rings with authenticity rather than artifice. . . .

Tolkien believed that stories shaped this way resonate so deeply because they align with something true about the world, something we sense intuitively even when we struggle to articulate it. The human heart longs for joy, but not cheap joy. It longs for a joy that has passed through sorrow and emerged on the other side.

Silva then notes that Tolkien “famously described the resurrection as the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation, the sudden and overwhelming joy that erupts from the deepest possible darkness.”

Here’s the point: What came for Jesus on Easter Sunday is coming for us all. We live in the junction between the cross and the empty tomb, fully aware of the pain and tragedy of our fallen lives but fully expecting God to fulfill his purposes in our world through his providential grace. We are honest about the darkness but confident in the light. We do not deny our suffering, but we deny its claim to ultimacy.

Silva concludes: “The story is not over. And when the final joy comes, it will not cheapen the sorrow that came before it. It will complete it.”

“When you truly know God”

When we know how the story ends, this changes the story for us.

Last night, my wife and I watched The Bourne Identity, a 2002 film adaptation of a Robert Ludlum novel. I read the book when it was published and we saw the movie when it was released. Accordingly, as we watched the film again, we knew not to worry when Jason Bourne’s life was threatened (repeatedly) because we knew he would win the fight, kill the assassins trying to kill him, and ultimately win the day.

Paul felt the same way about the “movie” of his life. Writing from a Roman prison, he was certain that “this will turn out for my deliverance” (Philippians 1:19). He did not mean that he would necessarily escape from jail, but that “Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death” (v. 20).

As a result, he could declare with triumphant joy, “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (v. 21). He could write Philippians, often called his “epistle of joy.” He could encourage us to “rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice” (Philippians 4:4). And he could tell us to trust every challenge to God in prayer, knowing that “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (v. 7).

When we remember that our momentary death leads to eternal joy, that the bad news leads to the best news, we are empowered to walk with the risen Lord Jesus in the face of suffering. He then transfuses temporal pain with timeless significance until the day his resurrection becomes our own.

1. I. Packer observed,

“There’s a difference between knowing God and knowing about God. When you truly know God, you have energy to serve him, boldness to share him, and contentment in him.”

Will you experience this “difference” today?

Quote for the day:

“Jesus, the very thought of thee, with sweetness fills my breast; but sweeter far thy face to see, and in thy presence rest.” —St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153)

Our latest website resources:

• What makes a hero? A Christian review of “The Odyssey”
• Lindsey Graham dies, Charlie Kirk hearing, Trump’s address, RIP Sam Neill & World Cup Final
• Thomas Jefferson’s childhood home lists for $17 million
• What baseball’s long road teaches us about following Christ
• Why the Strait of Hormuz echoes an unpredictable war

Denison Forum