Fifteen Years Of Believing Forward

There is a photograph on the shelf by the door of four grandchildren on a porch step, and you have prayed over it more than you have prayed over anything else in this house.

Fifteen years, near enough. The oldest one was three in that picture and she is finishing her studies now.

And what a fifteen years of praying it has been. You have not asked God to keep them comfortable. You have asked Him for their character. You have asked Him to give them work that means something and people who tell them the truth, and you have asked Him to be their God after you are gone, which is the one you mean most and the one you say least often out loud.

You believe every word of it. You have never once had to talk yourself into it. If somebody asked you tonight whether God has good things planned for those four, you would say yes without a pause and you would mean it all the way down.

And then last week the doctor said the ordinary thing that doctors say to a woman your age about the years ahead. And you nodded, and you were perfectly pleasant about it, and you came home and put the kettle on.

And it did not occur to you to pray about it.

Not once. Not out of despair. There was no crisis and no argument. You simply do not have a category for asking God about your own next fifteen years, because somewhere back down the line you decided your portion had been spent and the remainder belonged to them.

Now, before we go one step further.

I am not correcting you.

There is nothing shameful here and I have not found you out. Fifteen years of praying that photograph forward is one of the finest things I know of, and God has not sighed once over the way you have done it.

I am only saying I noticed the kettle. That is all.

The prayer of an old man

Here is a psalm written by somebody in exactly your position, and I want you to notice what he asks for.

Now also when I am old and greyheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come.Psalm 71:18

He is old. He says so plainly, twice. He is not pretending otherwise and there is nothing wistful in it.

But look at what he asks. He does not ask God to bless the next generation and leave him out of it. He asks God to stay with him, in the years he still has, and he ties it to the generation coming, and the two things are one request in his mouth.

The psalmist has not divided the world into their future and his ending. He has one future and it runs through him.

So let me turn and say it straight to you, standing at that kettle.

You are still on the list. Not one day, not when things are easier, not in some general way that includes everyone. Right now, with the photograph on the shelf behind you, you are inside a psalm written by somebody gray headed who was still asking, and the asking was not presumption, it was the whole point of the verse. That is not my flattery. That is what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a written line down onto a real woman in a real kitchen with the kettle coming up.

Now, why did it not occur to you?

I have thought about this a good deal, in myself as much as anybody. It is not despair. Despair announces itself.

It is a quiet arithmetic that an older person does once and never revisits, and it goes something like: there is a fixed amount of the goodness of God, and I have had my share, and what is left should go to them. It sounds like generosity from the inside. It has the shape of love.

But it is arithmetic, and the arithmetic is wrong, and I want to be plain about that because nobody else is going to be.

There is no fixed amount. Nothing you ask for yourself is subtracted from that photograph. The psalmist asks God not to forsake him so that he can show the next generation what God is like, which means his own portion is not competing with theirs; it is how theirs arrives.

And take this in, because it is already decided rather than pending. You have years in front of you that belong to God the way the last fifteen did. The word says until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, which is a request with a future in it, made by somebody old, and it is His Spirit who carries that from a page into a real week. Whatever number of years is in His hand, they are not leftovers.

A tree that has fruited for forty seasons is not a tree that has finished. It is a tree with roots.