Thursday: I Don’t Want to Lose the Accent
WEEK 47
THURSDAY
I DON’T WANT TO LOSE THE ACCENT
Titus 2:2-5
We look for one more day on the mastery of old age. We saw yesterday this was a joint affair, not all God, not all ourselves, but both. I was talking to an old lady of one-hundred-four who was bright and spry and alert. She had been a missionary in Burma. She told me that very day she read aloud to herself her Burmese Bible, for, she said, “I don’t want to lose the accent.” She would probably need it in heaven to carry on conversations with her Burmese friends!
This God-and-humanity togetherness for the mastery of old age is seen in the covenant God made with me. A year ago God said to me, “I’m going to give you the best ten years of your life.” One of those years is gone, and it has literally been the very best. So I expect the next nine to be the same—or better. Then when I get to the end of these ten years, I am going to ask for another extension, another best ten years! Then the Lord added this, “As long as you have anything vital to give, I’ll keep your body in repair so you can give it.” I loved that! That put me on my toes. For why should God keep my body in repair if I have nothing vital to give? If that day should ever come, I hope God will let my body break down—suddenly—like the “One Hoss Shay.”*
Just a year ago I was supposed to retire. I wrote the mission board, “You, of course, have to retire me according to the rules, at seventy. You may retire me as a missionary of the board. But you cannot retire me as a missionary and as an evangelist. That goes on. And goes on clear up to the very end.” There wasn’t a bump as I passed the line of the retiring age. I go on with my work at home and abroad. How long? Until the boiler bursts!
This necessity of having something vital to give throws me back not on reserves but on resources. As an old man says in Tagore’s words, “I am getting old now so I depend more on the wind than the oars—my sails are set.”** So are mine. I must catch the breezes of heaven—so more prayer. I must depend more on God—so more faith. I must do as God bids me—so more love. I must know God’s power, or mine fails—so more grace. Every day an adventure with God!
O Lord, I thank you for this adventure into adventurous living. There is a tingle in every nerve and a flush in every cell your power is pervading me. I let it, wholly. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I let the presence of the Spirit renew every cell, revive every fatigue, reinforce every power.
* “The One Hoss Shay,” also known as “The Deacon’s Masterpiece,” is a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., written in 1858.
** Rabindranath Tagore, as quoted in T. Cecil Myers, When Crisis Comes (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1967), 133.