Forty Years And Nobody Knows

Wendell has been doing this since 1984.

He does the arithmetic sometimes, at odd moments, standing at the sink. The young man who does the sound at church was not born. The pastor was eleven. His own daughter, who is a grown woman with a mortgage and opinions, did not exist.

Forty-one years. Different rooms, different machines, different decades, same forty minutes.

And here is the shape of his life, and it is worth stating without any sarcasm at all, because he has heard men described this way with a sneer and it has never helped anybody: he is a good man. Not a hypocrite in the way people mean it. He has sat with the dying. He has driven people to appointments at six in the morning for twenty years. He has given away money nobody knows about and taken a young man on at work twice when nobody else would.

None of that is a mask. That is who he is.

And there is a room nobody has ever been in.

What has changed this year is that he turned seventy-one and did some sums about time, and he found himself standing in his kitchen with a glass of water thinking the sentence that has now moved in permanently:

I am going to take this with me.

Not shame. He processed the shame decades ago into something quieter and heavier. What he is looking at now is arithmetic: there is not enough road left to have a whole second half. Whatever he does now, it will not be a life of freedom. It will be an epilogue of freedom, and he cannot see the point of a thing that small.

And here is where I quit talking about Wendell, because you are older than the people who write about this, and you have done your own sums about how much road is left, and you have quietly concluded that it is too late in the day to be worth the trouble.

Let me say the first thing straight, the way a neighbor should. That arithmetic is wrong, and it is not wrong because I am being kind about it. It is wrong because it is measuring the wrong thing.

The invitation is God's own, and it is open

Let me set the true thing down first, plain, before the sums start again.

You are not out of time and you are not past the point where this is worth doing. The offer in front of you is not a small consolation prize for a man who left it late. It is the same offer it has always been, and God is the one who opened it, out loud, first: And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

Come now, and let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.Isaiah 1:18

Sit with who is speaking in that verse. It is not a preacher inviting people forward. It is God, opening the conversation Himself, using the word come, which is what a man says when he wants somebody at the table rather than at the door.

And look at the color He names. Not a smudge. Scarlet, and crimson, which in that world was the one dye that did not come out. He picks the permanent stain on purpose and then says as white as snow, and He is not negotiating a reduction, He is describing a substitution.

So the invitation is God's own and it is standing open in your kitchen at seventy-one, and Scripture is where I get that rather than my own hopefulness, and His Spirit is not calculating whether you are worth the paperwork this late.

An epilogue is not a small thing

Now the arithmetic, because that is what is actually stopping you and nobody has taken it seriously.

You have decided that freedom now would be too short to matter. Four years, seven years, whatever the number is in your head. Not a life. An epilogue. The Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into the room you are actually in.

I have lived long enough to tell you what is wrong with that, and it is not sentimental. You are measuring the value of the years by their length, and the years God gives are not measured that way anywhere in Scripture. The thief on the cross had about six hours. Nobody has ever suggested his freedom was a rounding error.

And more than that: an epilogue is not a small book. It is the part everybody actually remembers. The last stretch of a man's life is when his grandchildren are watching most closely and understanding best, and a man who is free in those years is doing something in that family that thirty years of being good and hidden never did.

Hear this: you are not too late and there is no expiry on what Christ paid for. The offer standing in your kitchen tonight is exactly the same one that was standing there in 1984, undiminished, because God does not discount a rescue for arriving late. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it a thing a man of seventy-one can stand up in rather than a thing he agrees with in principle.

And the plain half, said the way a neighbor should say it. There is real help for this and none of it is weak faith. A counselor who works with it specifically, and there are men of your own age in those rooms. A doctor if the sleep or the low afterward has got heavy. One person, chosen by you, told in daylight. And nobody has the right to make telling your wife or your church the price of your freedom. That may be right, with wisdom and in time. It is not a toll at a gate.