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

 

 

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