Nearing Home - Billy Graham [3]
Because You have been my help,
Therefore in the shadow of Your wings I will rejoice.
My soul follows close behind You;
Your right hand upholds me. (Psalm 63:6–8 NKJV)
There is great comfort available, even to the aged, when we remember Him.
Not only does the Lord instruct us to remember, but the Bible reveals what the Lord Himself remembers—and what He chooses not to remember. “He remembers that we are dust” (Psalm 103:14 NKJV); and to those who are repentant He says, “Their sin I will remember no more” (Jeremiah 31:34 NKJV). I am so glad I can remember that promise. Because I have repented of my sin, God chooses to forget my sin. This is a glimpse into the heart of our Savior.
The Old Testament is filled with such remembrances. It even says, “Remember the former things of old” (Isaiah 46:9 NKJV). Society today may not like the word old, yet young people pay a small fortune for jeans that look old. Collectors put the highest value on antiques because they are . . . old! Others buy old clunkers, restore them, and then proudly drive down the highway showing off . . . the old.
The days when the aged were admired, looked up to, and respected are gone. Growing up, I was taught to look up to my elders, but there were only a few whom I considered to be ancient. I didn’t really know my grandparents (except for a grandmother who died while I was in elementary school), so I had little opportunity to observe any close relatives who were well along in years. Perhaps the oldest person in our family I can remember seeing regularly was an uncle who often came to our house for Sunday dinner. As I recall, he was a janitor at the county courthouse in Charlotte, and I always looked forward to his visits because he usually had some interesting stories to tell about local politics and other happenings around the courthouse. To me he seemed old (although he couldn’t have been much more than sixty since he was still working), so if someone had asked me then if I thought I would ever be as old as my uncle, I probably would have said, “No way.”
As far as I know, few members of my extended family lived much beyond seventy; my father passed away at the age of seventy-four after suffering a series of debilitating strokes. Following our 1957 crusade in New York City—a demanding sixteen-week marathon of meetings that left me physically drained—I told some of my associates that because of the intense, nonstop pace of our work I didn’t expect to live beyond fifty (I was thirty-eight at the time). Repeated physical problems in the years that followed— some minor, but others more serious—also made me doubt if I would live a normal life span. The added problems of middle age only seemed to support my theory.
And yet God in His goodness had other plans for me.
I am not sure exactly when it happened, but as the years passed, it gradually dawned on me that I was growing older. Middle age—I had to admit—was fading into the distance, and I was rapidly approaching what we politely call the mature years. Sometimes my age showed itself in small (even humorous) ways: the occasional embarrassment of forgetting a good friend’s name, the reluctant awareness that most of the people I saw on an airplane or passed in the street were looking extremely young, the experience of having a server in a restaurant give me the senior discount before asking if I qualified. But it also revealed itself in larger, more serious ways: a slow but inexorable decline in energy, illnesses that easily could have ended in disability or even death, the obvious aging—and even death—of people I had known most of my life, my wife Ruth’s brave but difficult struggles as the years passed and she grew increasingly frail.
I began relating to stories I heard from others. “Most of my middle-aged patients are in denial,” a doctor said to one of my associates. “They think they’ll always be able to play strenuous sports or travel anywhere they want or continue working twelve hours a day. They just assume if something goes wrong, I’ll be able to fix it. But