| Joshua 14:12 – “It may be that the Lord will be with me, and I shall drive them out just as the Lord said.” |
All of us, when we got up this morning, were older.
Now that may not exactly be the thought you want to start your day with, but it is true.
What is not true is that age determines your life. Someone has said that aging is mandatory but growing old is voluntary.
Or as Abraham Lincoln observed: “In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”
That’s why some strange beings should fascinate us.
In 1726, Jonathan Swift wrote the timeless satire Gulliver’s Travels.
It was a story of a man shipwrecked who washed up onto an island inhabited by small people. Both the Lilliputians and Gulliver were cautious.
But in the book, we meet these people, the Strulbruggs.
They are recognized by a red dot above their left eyebrow.
But something is different about them. They age as all do, but they do not die. They have immortality without the youth. They suffer from the diseases of age such as failing eyesight and hair loss, but they continue to live.
And the tragedy of the story is when they reach the age of 80, they are treated as if they were legally dead.
It is a tragedy when a society does not value the accumulated wisdom of age.
One of the people I would count as a spiritual giant was a man who only shows up a couple of times in Scripture. He is Caleb.
We meet him first as the spies return from the promised land. While ten hold to the doom and gloom, it is Caleb and the young Joshua who hold out the faith to go forward. They cannot persuade their comrades to their side. But in the end, the only two who knew anything about the slavery of Egypt to enter the land of promise were Joshua, as head of the people and then, in a dense shadow is Caleb.
But then, we come to the book of Joshua.
The land is apportioned. There was that place where the spies had gone forty years before. It was the land of the giants, and no one wanted that land…except one–Caleb.
He makes his appeal to Joshua. “I am still as strong today as I was in the day that Moses sent me; my strength now is as my strength was then, for war and for going and coming. So now give me this hill country of which the Lord spoke on that day, for you heard on that day how the Anakim were there, with great fortified cities. It may be that the Lord will be with me, and I shall drive them out just as the Lord said.”” (Joshua 14:11–12)
Think about it. The oldest man in Israel remains strong enough for the giants.
As George Raveling said, at 83, I realize most of life is a puzzle waiting to be solved and that having enough time is not necessarily the problem. The dilemma becomes how we utilize the time that we have left.
Perhaps we should have Caleb’s spirit. Getting older but spiritually growing stronger. That’s not a bad way to grow old.
Robert G. Taylor
robertgtaylor.com
