Little Things

During my professional years I thought of my time as fruit in a basket.  The basket, no matter how large or small, could only contain what its volume indicated.  I did not want it to be less than full, nor did I want it to spill over and be lost.  The concept was an important control for my life.  I might be asked to include this or that, to do this or that, and I would either say yes or no – depending upon what the basket would hold.  The negative response did not mean the request was unworthy, but that I could not do it justice in point of available hours, or ability to perform.  A new commitment could not be added until another was completed, or, for some reason, abandoned.  I continue the concept in old age, but the basket is smaller by a good deal in that energy, opportunity, tolerances, expectations and related factors have shrunk it. 

I continue to expect results, but would not achieve those results without management of my life.  There is always contribution to be made if one is not diverted in fretting about the good ol’ days when he or she was found in a large mix of life.  Life context changed.  My children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren have taken over.  Past offices have been occupied by younger leaders.  The world has changed requiring new skills and perceptions.  Even when catered to, the elder person seems smaller to the active world.

Elders lives shift or change, but there are significant remaining factors.  Influence is not as direct as once it was, but it is enlarged in prayer.  For some reasons unknown to mankind, prayer is influential with God, and that influence is felt by the elder person at prayer.  Memories are relived so to make impact on persons who listen to what the senior member has to say.  Prayer is heartwarming and summarizing so to prepare the elder for death’s transition.  Those who do not mentally prepare for this period find it lonely when they gain it.  The elder person is at best in encouraging the younger generations in personal, social, professional and spiritual life – to know that it was all worthwhile, and preparatory to something in the mystery of whatever there is beyond natural existence.  We now know what we have become – or ought to know. Unhappiness at this point suggests too strong attachment to the transient – our fading world.  Those who know most about nature prepare for decline to death even of nature.  Their general encouragement is that decline to the end is sufficiently deep into the future that we need not believe it will overcome our near-future generations, and that science may find some ways to slow the decline in resources, energy depletion, shifting of nature, and speed of the ravages of mankind.  Even so, they believe the evidence of the decline is already revealing of the direction nature is taking, and they are concerned with the speeding up of the processes.  Nature is not where human hope lies, even with proper respect we have for it.

A striking realization, normal to elders, is that a person seems to be such a little thing in the large context of the world and universe.  With the burgeoning population, the individual will appear, more and more, to be smaller and smaller in human courses.  This is partly seen in the increase of cremation so as not to take up land area for human remains.  Cemeteries will ultimately disappear.  We now make much of an attack on the New York Trade Center that snuffed out 3,000 lives, but simply report each year the tens of thousands of persons who lose their lives in accidents on the highway, or the loss of lives from alcoholism – and the list lengthens.  The numbers turn human beings into ciphers, except in the minds of their families and friends – a very tiny circle on a burgeoning globe.  Recently the report on the cause of death from alcoholism in one year in the United States was 88,000 persons, and the reporting group accented that they believed that better collection of evidence would enlarge that figure substantially.  Mankind can change individual status. It is clear from Scripture that God does not diminish the individual.  He is God to each person who admits him into their free lives.  He offers mankind as much freedom as is possible in a limited world context.  He seeks those who choose his kingdom.  He acknowledges those who love and serve him in their creation. They live well and serve.  We call them angels, archangels, seraphim and we identify among human beings some who rebel.  Mankind is unique among the self-conscious creations of God, suggested in the saying that a human soul is of greater importance than the world.  Faith embraces status.