I Thought This Was A Young Person's Trouble

Bill has said the sentence about young people out loud. More than once. At a table, with an audience, and he got a laugh.

You cannot get a word out of any of them. They are all looking at those things.

He was sixty-seven when he started saying it and he meant it and it was, in fairness, partly true.

He is sixty-nine now and it is ten past two in the morning and he is sitting in his own front room with the lamp off and a lit rectangle about eleven inches from his face, and he has been there since about half past eleven, and he could not tell you what he has looked at.

That is the part. He could not tell you.

He knows roughly. There was something about a fellow who restores old machinery, which was genuinely interesting. There was some argument about a thing that happened in a town he has never been to. There was a stretch, and he does not know how long a stretch, of short videos of dogs, and he does not particularly like dogs.

Two and a half hours of a life at sixty-nine, which is a stage of life where a man has done the sums about how many of those he has got.

And what is on him is not really guilt about the hours.

It is that this is not supposed to be his. He was allotted the other role: the man who says the sentence about young people at a table and gets a laugh. There is no version of himself he has ever imagined that includes this, and so there is nobody on earth he could say it to, because saying it would mean handing back the sentence he has been getting laughs with for two years.

I am too old for this. And I do not mean that as an excuse. I mean I do not know who to be if this is what I am doing.

And here is where I quit talking about Bill, because you are past the age where anybody expects this of you, and that is precisely why it has stayed quiet.

Let me say the first thing straight, the way a neighbor should, and it is not a lecture about telephones. Nobody is going to tell you that machines are wicked, and you would not listen if they did, and they would be wrong. What has got you is a hold, and holds do not check identification at the door.

Common to man

Let me set the heavy thing down first, plain, because most of what is on you at ten past two is not the hours.

You are not a strange case. There is no separate category for a man of sixty-nine, and what has hold of you is not exotic and it is not shameful, and Scripture says something about that with unusual bluntness: And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

There has no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that you are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that you may be able to bear it.1 Corinthians 10:13

Sit with the first clause for a minute, because everybody rushes past it to get to the escape.

Common to man. That is not a small phrase. It is God saying, before anything else, that what has got you is ordinary and human, and that no part of your situation places you outside the run of people. It is aimed squarely at the thing you have actually been suffering from, which is not the two hours, it is the feeling that this is not supposed to be yours.

And then the way out is not described as something you generate. God makes it. He makes a way, which means somebody who is not you is doing the making.

So you are not an anomaly at sixty-nine, and Scripture is where I get that rather than my own generosity, and God's Spirit is not in that front room at two in the morning wondering what has become of you. The Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into the room you are actually in.

The sentence you have been getting laughs with

Now let me deal with the actual trap, because it is not the machine and it is not the hours.

It is the sentence at the table.

You built a small position for yourself, the way men our age do, and it got laughs, and the trouble with a position is that it becomes a place you have to keep standing. Now you cannot say this to anybody without demolishing something you have been maintaining for two years, and so it stays in a dark room at two in the morning with nobody in it.

That is what is actually taking the life: not the videos of dogs. The isolation the position requires.

And there is a thing worth knowing about men our age, which is that a good deal of what gets called stubbornness is really this: a man who has taken a position and cannot find the door out of it without losing face, so he stays in the position and pays for it privately for years.

Hear this: your attention belongs to you and it was given to you, and there is nothing about the years behind you that puts it out of God's reach or out of yours. He is not asking you to defend a position. He is offering you a way out that He makes rather than one you have to invent at sixty-nine. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it something a man can actually do this week rather than something he agrees with in principle.

And the plain half, said the way a neighbor should. If this has got heavy, real help exists and none of it is weak faith. A counselor is not an overreaction for two and a half hours a night. A doctor is worth telling, because sleep at sixty-nine is a medical matter and not only a habit, and because a man scrolling at two might be scrolling away from something worth looking at. And one person told in daylight is worth more than any of it, because the whole thing runs on nobody knowing.