Time Slips Away

Shortly after my last post (August 2007), I turned 39 years old. Nobody told me what to expect by that age. Of course, getting older affects everyone differently. From everything I've heard, nearly everyone dreads turning 40. So, I expected that I would be melancholy before I turned 40. Instead, to my surprise, the doldrums hit me a year early. Now, some 6 months later, I'm finally coming to grips with its implications and what I must do from here.

The biggest part of the melancholy I've felt has been about wasted opportunities, failures, frivolity and whatever shortcomings that have come from the first 39 years of my life on this planet. Youth is the time of dreams and hoping for big things. For any number of reasons, certain dreams go by the wayside, yet life goes on. Many of those dreams or grand ideas give way to good sense and reason. Sometimes those dreams die a slow death. A few live on as a specter that can cast a shadow on any achievement that one can manage - raising the question of "what if?" at every turn. Was the course I chose better than any other course that could or might have been? In the words of the famous poem, The Road Less Traveled, the choice is what "made all the difference." For me, 39 was time to take stock of those choices - including the ones I might wonder about their outcome. "What if I had...?" In the words of the great king and philosopher from scripture, Solomon, "such is folly."

Now, after spending at least 6 months considering these frivolous ideas, I think I'm ready to proceed on with the rest of my life. I'm at peace with the fact and reality that I won't die a rich man. Though I had aspirations of being a successful artist and musician, I will likely never reach a pinnacle of success that I dreamed of as a young man. And that's OK, too. After all, I didn't make the sacrifices that those who have succeeded in their crafts made.

But, as a young man, I did make a choice. I felt, at the age of 20 that I had been called by God to be a minister of the Gospel of Christ. At the time, that appeared to be something like what I was familiar with - a model of a man dutifully preaching in a small, local church assembly week after week, month and year after year until I could do it no more. I made the choice, at that time, to leave the small, mid-western college I was attending to attend a Bible college in my home state of Texas. In pursuing that dream, it led me, my wife - who joined me while this dream was still in its infancy - and our family in a course that we never could have planned or conceived. It led us through those small assemblies, as well as large ones. I chose to cast off those other dreams to pursue the one with no recourse or no sort of back-up plan. It was either all or nothing.

In the time since, my family I have experienced a full spectrum of emotions, triumphs and hardships, successes and brutal failures that we likely would have not faced had I chosen another way. To my delight, I have been able to experience the joy of experiencing some of the dreams I had as a young man peek into the other world that I chose. I've been blessed to play music on foreign soil, write and publish (well, I'm still working on that part) my own songs and experience what I think church and Gospel ministry was intended to be. Of course nearly all of this didn't look anything like I imagined it as a younger man. I suppose it takes an older man to reconcile the two and make the most from it. I also know that at this point in my life, if I choose not to stay this course I have chosen, all that I have done to this point of my life was for nothing. That is why, at this point of my life, it's best to stay the course. But now, to do so with the renewed vigor that only an older man can, pursuing a dream that a young man might have.