From Aging Out on a Couch to an Available Life

I intend to write something here today about aging. I’m going to begin by telling you something about John, the apostle of Jesus, who late in a long life, wrote the Revelation that ends the New Testament. He had been in his twenties when he saw Jesus crucified. Decades later, he had been in his seventies when he was the pastor of a church in Ephesus and wrote the much loved story of Jesus, the Gospel, and the three letters that bear his name. When Rome’s most violent and hated emperor caught up with him and shipped him off to a penal colony on a small island called Patmos, he was deep into his eighties.

I have stood in the cave on Patmos where tour guides will tell you John received and wrote down the vision that we know as the Revelation, the last book of the Bible. Nobody can actually prove beyond tradition that cave was the place, but there is no strong evidence it wasn’t either. What can be proved without doubt is something a little smaller but important: an old man was on that island because Roman authorities had placed him there to get rid of him, and in that place, he wrote.

I don't know what kind of shape he was in when he wrote. He had seen a lot and been through a lot. Maybe his hands worked well enough to write. Maybe the hard labor of that penal colongy had worn him down into something closer to an invalid, and someone else wrote while he spoke. Either way doesn’t matter. What interests me is that in the last two decades of his life, he had made himself available to be used. And for twenty centuries, generations have benefited by his simple willingness to be available.

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I’m thinking about this because I’m living into what I know are the last chapters of my life. I don’t say that for effect. I say it because it is true. When I began a life of ministry, I could have held my hand out to the sides as far apart as possible and said I have this much time left. Reasonably, that would have been accurate. But now my hands are much closer together to show that I have less time available. This isn’t dramatic. This isn’t sad. This is simply an accurate and honest assessment of my own life span.

What has been intriguing me as I think about this is that what most of our culture hands us when we get older are three choices: a financial plan, a cruise brochure, or a life on a couch. There isn’t much that places a vision before you of continuing to live an available life. The wrestle in this article is whether those continued years of availability matter. Against the judgment of culture that says we’re just living out leftover years in our latter years after our most important years ended earlier, I’m standing up and saying they do matter.

I know our culture has an answer for the question of whether these later years of life matter. I disagree with it. Strongly. I know if Moses had shown up today asking to lead a migration of people at the age of eighty, someone would have asked him about his succession plan. Had Caleb, at age eighty-five, volunteered today to end the violence in a mountain community, the hiring committee would have told him to sit this one out. We have decided as a culture that life stops contributing at a certain age and all that’s left is aging out. On a couch. Out of the story. Again, like I’ve said, I disagree with this conclusion and this culturally accepted way of aging.

One of the reasons I disagree is because of what I witnessed in my own life. I am who I am today because a man decided not to age out on a couch and instead, remained available. I was twenty-one when I met Elton Trueblood. He was seventy-seven. He had written thirty books by then. He would only write three more after that. He might have lost a step or ten compared to when he was fifty. I can’t confirm that. What I can tell you is that he was wise, willing to be available, and capable of seeing beyond my unformed life and then do the slow work of guiding the growth of one more person. I don’t know what that cost him. I only know what it built into me. What I witnessed in that early chapter of my adult life was a man in the last chapter of his life who was living a life of availability instead of aging out on a couch.

As I keep thinking about what I’m doing here at The Stillpoint, that one word keeps surfacing for me: available. Not impressive. Not relevant. Available. Available to be used. Available to be present. Available to pay attention. John, on Patmos, had no church in Ephesus demanding things of him and he had no stage on which he could perform and impress others. What he had left was availability to pay attention, and what he saw gave us hope that God holds a good ending to it all no matter how shaky things can feel in the meantime. Elton Trueblood, deep in his eighties, was no longer building a career and a resume. What he did instead was just as important: opening a door open for whoever walked in, including me.

As I’m living these latter years of my life in Northwest Montana, I don’t know what they hold. I don’t know exactly how many years I have to write and provide a place of renewal and transformation for leaders here under Glacier’s shadow. I don’t think that matters. What grips me is the possibility of keeping a door open and paying attention to whoever walks in. Seeing what God is up to. Living a life of availability.

Who is a person whose availability has made a difference in your life?

Are you willing to live a life of availability in this chapter of your life?

What might being available look like in your situation? What might you have to change to become more available? What step are you willing to take today?