Health issues multiply, my back aches, and my knees hurt and crackle when I stand. My hair is silvering, sobering furrows frown back at me from the mirror, and activities once taken in stride now leave me discouragingly weary.
Something else far deeper happens as you age: your losses mount. The dreams of youth — once passionate and optimistic — begin peeling away like aging paint, checkered by the weathering of time and the harsh sunlight of life and its limitations.
Some visions die with brutal abruptness: a passion for music shattered in the fraction of a second it takes for a board to blow off a table saw. Some die more slowly, almost imperceptibly: the acquired skills of software development, seeking to be leveraged into a career of mapping real-life problems to the rigid logic of data flow and control statements, receded as a larger purpose and renewed passion in medicine and reflective writing triumphed over another longstanding obsession.
But something else happens with age, if you are fortunate: you begin to get a measure of perspective, as your once-treasured bangles fall away, revealed for the insubstantial veneer they always were. Your vision gets longer — events painful and pleasurable take on new meaning, often quite different from impressions gleaned at their occurrence. Time becomes more precious, as the endless reserves of youth grow leaner, and the storehouse of minutes, once unlimited, increasingly diminish. If your life has purpose, each moment is a jewel to be treasured as precious and used for good purposes; if not, the minutes drip endlessly and pointlessly from a cracked cistern too soon to be empty.
In days younger, intellectual sparring was competitive sport for me, exchanging my tit for your tat, lunge and parry, endless words exchanged in trench warfare, siege guns pounding at targets imagined but unseen. Such verbal warfare was a rough stone that sharpened the axe but left jagged wounds on both sides. No minds were changed, few souls were touched, no hearts regenerated. It is a pursuit I long ago abandoned as fruitless, as time has become too precious to squander in empty warfare over barren ground. But the desire sometimes resurfaces, its siren call beckoning to one more glorious battle.
In a recent discussion on prayer and surgical complications, I encountered a bright and well-spoken commenter, a self-declared skeptic whose disdain for Christians and their faith is robust, albeit reasonably respectful for the agnostic genre. He challenged the idea that prayer is anything more than self-deception, an unfalsifiable belief. While complimenting my writing, he was unimpressed by its logic.
And despite my wizened wisdom of aversion to verbal battles, such a comment strikes a word warrior like me as a challenge. To avoid such jousting — like the duels of old — is to risk dishonor, concede intellectual defeat, and cede the battlefield to one stronger. Nevertheless, his analysis of logical flaws was thorough, educational, and, given the restrictive restraints of a skeptic’s worldview, valid — as far as they go, which is nowhere near far enough.
I thanked my challenger for his comment, asserting that it had been helpful to me in ways he could not know — which it was, indeed, for it reminded me of where I am, and where I have been.
I am bemused, you see — bemused to be told at my age that I do not know what I know with certainty — and that I cannot ascertain the knowledge — or more precisely, the power — that has transformed my life. Do you know my life story, my friend? Do you know how a man, filled with empty knowledge and the false assurances of talents and youth, a loving family, and a life undeservedly blessed, can squander it all for the pursuit of self-satisfying intellect, arrogance, self-sufficiency, and contempt of others? Have you been in that place of desperate emptiness, having pushed away your children and made your wife a living widow, driving forward with blind foolishness until your own hollow life is endangered?
You say you have prayed and those prayers were not answered; I too have prayed — years on end — to a God I thought I knew, but who in mercy left me to suffer the consequences of a life driven by self-will and self-satisfaction. Hollow prayers, desperate prayers, prayers a fool’s cry for help to a now-empty universe. A God I once understood ultimately proved completely inscrutable, hopelessly distant, His ear — if He existed at all — turned elsewhere, His eye on more worthy subjects. In an hour unimaginably dark, have you seen that same God you never knew reach down with gentle hands and unspeakable love to scoop up this poor refuse and restore him to a life and hope he could never have imagined?
You say I pray from fear: I have known fear — the kind that tears up your gut like ground glass, eating at your soul like cancer. I have lived with such fear for weeks, months, years — where each dawning day is filled with dread, and death looks inviting — were it not so terrifying. I have no such fear today — it is gone, by virtue of grace and mercy. I pray out of gratitude; I pray out of trust; I pray out of joy at a life now meaningful and at peace. I pray for the burdens of others, I pray to be of service, to fulfill my purpose in life. But fear? Never fear, I’m afraid.
You accuse me of misleading my readers — naïve and sheep-like, all — promising them certainty where no such certainty exists. I have lived a life of deceit, where lies were a daily fare, where shame drove me to masquerade as someone I was not, juggling a web of lies until I could no longer distinguish truth from untruth. I lied to others — and most importantly, I lied to myself. Some habits die hard — I would tell you I no longer am a liar, but that would be untrue. But I have found transparency to be a far simpler life. I write of my thoughts, passions, struggles, and life here. I strive to deceive no longer — what you see is what you get.
And this “illusion” I sustain is not mine alone. Have you watched men die? I have seen men die with God, and without; those in peace and acceptance, and those with empty eyes filled with dread and hopelessness at life’s defining moment. I have seen close friends transformed from cold, hard, arrogant bastards to men of compassion and grace in mere days by the power of prayer and faith. I have watched my father-in-law — a stern and angry man who ferried men to their death at Normandy, who wreaked much havoc in the lives of his family and others around him, embrace his death with a peace rarely witnessed, ferried in calm anticipation into the arms of a waiting Savior, his dying words, “Welcome aboard, Jesus!” This is life in the trenches, far removed from the rarefied air of the classroom and faculty lounge, where ideas float like paper planes unbuffeted by the storms of life. Such evidence in your world would never pass muster — but it is evidence, indeed, and its power changes lives, not merely puffs up minds.
What if I have an epiphany and accept the path you offer, rejecting the claims to know what you assert as mere magical fantasy and pure self-delusion? If I choose the life you offer — the life of “intellectual honesty” and contempt for those less wise, the life of mockery of men so foolish as to pray, the life of lofty intellect, of propositional knowledge devoid of positional experience — what’s in it for me? You see, I am a selfish man and have no interest in accepting a gift horse without checking its teeth.
In accepting your offer, would I forgo a life of joy and purpose, a life rescued from despair and aimless meandering, with everything money could buy and nothing that money cannot? Would I forgo the richness of deep relationships, of love unmerited, of surprise at life’s amazing turns and answered prayer — yes, answered prayer — the proof you would not accept, but the reality of which is transformational? Would I forgo a relationship with a God I now know far less well but trust far more — not the heinous monster of your imagining, but a God who treasures me — and you — with unspeakable magnitude and unbounded grace and mercy? No, my friend, I will remain your fool, gladly and with no shame or remorse.
You will, no doubt, rejoin with tales of straw men and special pleading, equivocation and circumlocution. Bluster thusly if you must; I have had my say. I have lived the life of lifeless reason; I choose instead the life of fools. But know this: you have earned a place in my heart, and will be in my prayers henceforth. And of this I am certain: your life will change. Not today, not tomorrow, or next week — but it will change. — in ways you will not anticipate, nor wish at the time, nor understand in your wisdom. But someday you will know, as I know — and we will be friends, not rivals.
