Wednesday: The Heavenly Frisky
WEEK 47
WEDNESDAY
THE HEAVENLY FRISKY
Isaiah 65:17-20
Let us note one or two things more on the mastery of old age. One who mastered old age, Rufus Moseley, said he had found what he called the “heavenly frisky.” As I was about to speak to an audience in a YWCA in Japan, I was introduced to the president. She was eighty-two, but her face and spirit were both beautiful and very young. Our bodies sag because our minds are sagging. We are not discovering new truth and insights. Rufus Moseley said to me, “I have a very young man down on the inside of me.” His playful joy persisted through several years of painful arthritis. He was happy when he was well and when he was ill—just plain happy—inherently so.
A minister prayed a very simple prayer, “O God, hit us on the head and wake us up,” and sat down. It was a good prayer. Or maybe God is waiting for us to do what someone wisely suggested, “If you find your brain getting caked and set, take it out and jump on it.” Give yourself shock treatment—personally administered—and then believe that God can rejuvenate you.
“True, I am worn; / But who clothes summer, who is life itself? / God that created all things can renew.”* God can and does if we let him. Let us remember we can make up in quality what we lack in quantity as we get older.
If, however, they remember that as the sun nears the west their shadows may lengthen and increase, they may well cease vain regrets. There is nothing more beautiful and nothing that has greater power of winsome attraction than the influence of a matured Christian life, the shadow of one who is nearing the end of the journey.**
I mentioned an old lady of a hundred who gave her recipe for growing old gracefully, “Take care of others and let God take care of you.” I repeat that as it is important; for if you think of yourself first, you will grow old miserably instead of masterfully. If we think first of ourselves, then God will let us take care of ourselves and decay in the process, for we have tied God’s hands.
Dear Lord, I open the windows of my spirit to your breath. Breathe into me your divine invigorating power, so that I may be remade in every portion of body, mind, and spirit. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Since my bodily forces are on the downgrade, my spiritual forces will be on the upgrade.
* Robert Browning, “Paracelsus,” The Complete Works of Robert Browning (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), 52.
** J. Stuart Holden, “Unconscious Influence,” Record of Christian Work, vol. 27 (East Northfield, MA: W. R. Moody, 1908), 724.