Too Late To Move At All

She said it as a joke and then heard herself say it and went quiet.

Her granddaughter had been talking about something she was learning, and had said, in the way young people do, that it was never too late, and she had said: "It is when you are eighty one, love."

They both laughed. And then there was a beat that neither of them filled.

Because it was not a joke. She has been thinking about it for a good while, and the thought goes like this, and it is not self pity, it is arithmetic done by a practical woman.

There is a thing about her temper. It has been there her whole life. Sharp, quick, gone in a minute, and it has cost her more than she has ever admitted to anybody, including a fair stretch of her relationship with her middle son that never fully mended.

She has prayed about it since she was in her twenties.

And what she has settled into now is not defeat exactly. It is more like a decision to stop wasting the effort. If sixty years of asking has not shifted it, then what she is now is what she will be, and the practical thing at eighty one is to make peace with that and not go stirring things up.

That is the sentence I want to look at. What I am now is what I will be.

It sounds like wisdom. It sounds like the sort of thing an old woman is entitled to say. And it is not true, and there is a verse with her name on it.

Still is the word

There is a line at the end of the ninety second psalm about people planted in the house of the Lord, and everybody quotes the first half and misses the word that carries it.

They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing.Psalm 92:14

Take that at your own table. You are still bearing, and still is the word the verse turns on. The word says they shall still bring forth fruit in old age, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the sap in it at eighty one.

Still.

Take that word on its own for a minute. Still means the thing that was happening is continuing. It is a word about a process that has not been interrupted by the arrival of a season everybody assumed would end it.

The psalm does not say the old are honored, though they are. It does not say they are looked after in their decline. It says fruit is still being produced, which is a present tense, active, ongoing claim about somebody in their ninth decade.

And fruit, as the New Testament makes plain, is not achievement. It is what grows on a living thing.

So take this at your own kitchen table, and know it is not me being sweet to an old woman, it is what is written: you are still bearing, right now, in your eighty first year. His word says they shall still bring forth fruit in old age, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the sap in it, and He has not been informed of any retirement date.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who taught that a believer goes on. He meant motion, in the ordinary week, all the way through.

He was still riding at eighty. Still preaching. Still writing, still editing, still correcting his own earlier opinions in print, which is a thing very few men will do at any age. He wrote in his journal at eighty six about his own faults, plainly, without either despair or resignation, as a man still expecting change.

And the instrument he built worked exactly the same at eighty as at twenty. Six people in a room, asked out loud how it stood with them, weekly.

He never built a version for the elderly with less expectation in it. There was no point at which somebody was moved to a category of people who had finished.

The name that got attached to those people started as a joke about how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method goes cold. A method with no warmth is a timetable and nothing more. He held both, into his eighties.