Congratulations on Being Another Year Younger

   Well, its 2009!  We are off on another adventure together.  It’s a beautiful trip, although it is rather long… about 584 million miles.  It really does have something for everyone… literally.  For all you daredevils out there, we have been traveling together for the last year at about 67,000 miles per hour, and show no signs of slowing.  So grab a hold and enjoy the ride, its time to take another lap.  We’re kinda like vacationing folks on the same cruise ship, or teenagers in a small town on Fiday night:  cruise through town, wave at friends, burn a little gasoline, enjoy being alive together, make the loop, and do it again.

  My lack of blog entries is a good indicator of how crazy were the last few weeks of ’08 around or house.  In addition to the normal tossed salad treatment the holidays give your schedule, I also had to make a trip back to Conway, Ar.  It seems our house there was needing some repairs. [If you are in the market for a good house in the central Arkansas area, priced well above anything the present market can possibly sustain, give me a call.]  Being uninhabited, a roof leak became a ceiling collapse and I “celebrated” a couple days by repairing both. 

     While in Conway, myself and Houston, ( my 7 year old assistant) were able to see a few friends and visit with Neil.  That night  Neil and his roommates went to see “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”  They confirmed my impression that it was a truly “curious” tale for a movie.  Their only critique was the creators could have skipped a year or two along the way; they didn’t have to include every month of the guy’s life!  It was a very long movie. 

  Maybe it was the movie, maybe it was all the pretending about Santa Claus, or perhaps just the holidays and the fun of staying up until midnight New Year’s eve… something got me to thinking.  How young will I be on January 1, 2010?

  You see, I remember when I was at my oldest.  I was already pretty old when I graduated from High School.  Everything was so serious then.  There wasn’t much room for kicking back, being silly, having fun.  By the time I finished my undergraduate degree, I had “matured.”  I remember thinking, “I know all the answers to the question, “What does the Bible teach?”  There were no surprises left, maybe some fine tuning here or there, but there were no more unexplored woods or trails to travel not knowing where they led.  Spiritually, I knew the answers to whether one could do a 360 on the swingset, and how grandparents remembered everyone’s birthday.  The wonders had all been revealed, I was “mature,” and “adult”… the last stage of growth.  That was the oldest I have ever been.

   Fortunate for me, the Lord didn’t let me go into preaching right then.  Instead, I found my way to Harding Graduate School of Religion in Memphis.  At HGSR I found that there was a lot of the world left to explore.  True, I knew the map of my little area pretty well, but there were whole continents out there I hadn’t explored.  There were lands, cultures, (ideas, thoughts, perspectives) that were strange, beautiful, and enchanting.  I learned that even though the map I had drawn of my little area was fairly good, it didn’t replace walking all those trails and experiencing the sights.  Even in the Bible, a book in which I thought I had explored every nook, I found doors to places I had never gone, questions I had never asked.

  As I took the journey of my faith to explore new and different lands, walked along trails whose end I did not know, and held in my hands sights I had not seen… an amazing thing happened.  I was enjoying Bible study again, there was joy in learning, there were wonders I couldn’t yet get my mind around, I was losing my fear of what I didn’t know… I was growing younger.  I no longer had to run and hide from what I didn’t know, from questions for which I had no answers, and from complexities I couldn’t explain.  Now I could could search for what I did not know, and embrace it when I found it.  I could grab it by the heel and not let go until it gave its blessing.

  I am a little amused by how old I used to be.  I will forever be indebted to those who revived my youth… Dowell Flatt, Ralph Gilmore, Doug Brown, Richard Oster, Phil Slate, and others.  I have learned that what I know is comfortable… like your living room.  A nice place to relax from time to time.  But if you spend all your time in your living room, cabin fever sets in.  There is no joy in being a spiritual “shut-in.”  The adventure lies out there where there are new parks to play in, friends to play with, vacant lots to explore, new paths to walk together, and new lands you’ve never seen.

  So here’s to us all growing another year younger in ’09.