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On Becoming Ninety
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On Becoming Ninety
By Wallace Alcorn
On August 29, I became ninety-years-of-age. I’m completely inexperienced, and I’m not sure what to do about this condition.
I hear people ask, “Where did all the years ago?” Well, I lived each for exactly twelve months, and they went one-by-one until there are ninety. And I know where they are now: in the past. I can’t retrieve them and live them again. Not even one. But I can live upon them.
On this anniversary, someone is likely to ask, “If you could live your life all over again, what would you do differently?” Put this way, it’s nonsense. A life, by definition, starts with one blank to be filled in year by year of living. The blanks for various lives vary in size by how many years will need to be accommodated. None of us knows this, only the number already lived. How many remain is equally unknown (except statistically not as many).
The only way this silly question could make any sense would be: If you could hold onto all you have learned in this life and then begin your life all over again, what would you do differently? If that were so, it wouldn’t be my life at all. The first ninety years of my life are already lived and can never be lived again. To be actually my life, it would need to be without what I have learned to this point. In this case, what would I do differently? Probably nothing. I’d make the same dumb mistakes because my life is exactly what my life has been.
Being impossible for this to be the question, it must be: Given the life I have lived for ninety years, how am I going to live the years remaining?
The sad fact of the matter is, although I have lived through ninety, I have not actually lived every one. It can be understood I wasn’t yet able really to live the first several. I feel God’s forgiveness for wasting many and blowing a few. But even these God’s grace has redeemed by what I learned from them. With forgiveness and healing, two wrongs can make a right.
What I am doing with my remaining years is to live every one of them. This is that difference. I am under commission so to live the life God gave me ninety years ago as not just to “give” God the glory but, by his grace, to be the glory God created and redeems. The Lord and I are going to enjoy these years so much that I suspect I’ll go into heaven kicking and screaming (and then ask forgiveness one last time).
About the Author | Wallace Alcorn
Wallace Alcorn has been a pastor, teacher and army chaplain.
