Octogenarians one and all
June 5, 2012 (Tuesday)
My dear friend, Dale Pogue, will have his 80th birthday next week, but it is being celebrated a few days early this Saturday. Congratulations are in order. We are all looking forward to the birthday party Saturday afternoon.
I turned 80 last September, and many of my friends have reached their 80th year within months of each other. We all graduated from high school around the same time; my graduation year was 1949, and the class was known as “The Forty-Niners” in the yearbook. Taking a look at that book today, we see pictures of people around eighteen years of age. Now they are eighty. If you don’t pronounce your words clearly, you might confuse “eighteen” and “eighty.” If all the others are as I, however, they cannot confuse the “80” and the “18.” As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 (The Living Bible Paraphrase): “These bodies of ours are not the right kind to live forever.” Most, if not all of us “octogenarians” have some aches and pains we didn’t have at eighteen. I’m sure most of us share one trait: we are glad to be alive.
I remember the milestones of age through the years. “Twenty-one” was one of them. I know it’s silly even to think about, but I actually expected to feel different when I woke up on my 21st birthday. But I felt just like I did when I went to bed, only rested. “Thirty” was a “wake-up call,” as they say, because it had always seemed old when I was in my twenties. It really didn’t seem old on my birthday that year, but I knew somehow I had crossed a line from youth to something a little different. “Forty” was the one that brought full realization that “I’m not a kid anymore,” and I’m pretty much on the path I will be on from now on. “Fifty” was a heartbreaker for me. I could not believe I was actually fifty years old. The staff at church kept trying to tell me I was OK, but I found it hard to accept. “Sixty” was actually easier than “fifty” because I had grown accustomed to being a senior citizen and being given that “senior discount.” “Seventy” cannot be said without hearing “threescore and ten” from the Bible, and remembering that it declares that to be the normal limit. But the rest of the verse brings up “Eighty” as a possibility. When I reached eighty I looked up my life expectancy; the charts give me at least 12 more years. I guess those extra years must be from the “Revised Standard Version.”
I repeat: I’m glad to be alive. Thankful to the Lord for life itself, but thankful also for the many, many blessings he has literally poured out upon me all this time.
__________________________________________________________________________________
“My times are in thy hand” (Psalms 31:15)
A hymn by that name (click here).