I Outlived The Years I Could Feel Him

He is seventy-nine and he can tell you where he was standing.

Nineteen sixty-something, a field meeting, three days of rain, a tent that leaked over the back rows. He was twenty-two. And whatever came down in that tent came down on him and did not lift for about eleven years.

He is not romanticizing it. He will say himself that some of what went on in those years was foolishness. But he knows what he had. He would be walking a fence line and find he had stopped, because something had come up in him and he had to stand still for a minute. That happened for eleven years. It happened at work, at the market, once in the middle of a sale.

He cannot remember when the last one was.

Somewhere in his forties, he thinks, and it did not stop suddenly, it thinned. And it has been thin for thirty-five years, and he has been faithful the whole time in the way that nobody notices: still there, still giving, still the man they ring when a family is in trouble at midnight.

And here is what he thinks, and he has never said it, because how does a man of seventy-nine say a thing like this without it sounding like self-pity.

He thinks God went on.

Not that God rejected him. He thinks the Holy Spirit does what the world does, which is move along to the ones who have the years in front of them. He watches the young men in that church with something he is careful to keep clear of envy, and he is genuinely glad, and underneath the gladness he thinks: it is theirs now. He gave me eleven years and He went on to them, and I am finishing on what I remember.

And that is you in your own chair, or you would not still be reading.

God says the words gray hair, and He says them on purpose

Most of Scripture speaks to people without saying how old they are. Here is one that does, and I want you to hear who is being addressed before you hear what is promised.

Even to your old age I am he, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save.Isaiah 46:4

Even to your old age. To gray hairs.

God is not being general there. He picks out the stage of life you are in and names it, and He names it because it is the stage at which a man begins to suspect he has been handed on from. He answers the suspicion by getting there first.

And look at what He says He does at that age. Not visits. Not remembers. Carry. Four verbs in one line, and every one of them is Him doing something to you, and not one of them asks anything from you.

You are being carried at seventy-nine by Somebody who named your age out loud before promising it. It is written, even to your old age I am He, and to gray hairs I will carry you (Isaiah 46:4). The Holy Spirit did not go on ahead with the young men in that church.

Now the reasoning, because it is a decent man's reasoning and it is built on one bad assumption.

You reasoned that God does what the world does: allocates Himself to the years that are still ahead. But the verse just before that one has Him saying He has borne you from before you were born, from the belly, from the womb, and a Presence that started before you had any years ahead of you was never allocating on that basis at all. He was not investing in your future. He was not investing.

You are not being finished off on what you remember, and He was never running the calculation you think He was running. It is written that He has borne you from before you were born and will carry you to gray hairs (Isaiah 46:3-4), which covers the whole span with no reallocation anywhere in it. The Holy Spirit is not a resource that gets moved to where the return is better.

And here is the last of it, flat, with nothing on the end of it.

He is in you tonight, at seventy-nine, in the chair you are sitting in. Not the memory of Him. Him. The same One who came down in a leaking tent in the sixties is in an old man in a quiet house, and there is nothing about the thinning that changed it.

You have the Holy Spirit in you right now, thirty-five years into the thin stretch. It is written that He has said, I will never leave you nor forsake you (Hebrews 13:5), and never runs the full length of a life and out the other end. The Holy Spirit stayed for every one of the thirty-five years you have been calling empty.