Meant to be Sent...Continued from page 2

Put yourself in the position of Elizabeth and Zechariah. All your life, you had prayed for a child. All your life, you had been faithful in the service of God. All your life, you had read the Old Testament Scriptures. All your life, you had done your best to obey the Old Testament Law. All your life, you had looked forward to the coming of the Messiah. Now, the years had turned into decades, and many of them had passed, and it was time for retirement. Many of your friends had settled back, finding their greatest joys came from being surrounded by their children and their grandchildren. Many of them had not been as faithful to God as had you. Look what they had. Look what you were missing.

I don’t know how I would have reacted. I do know this. I would have been tempted to throw in the towel, take it easy and at least cut back on my spiritual involvements. After all, God hadn’t been as good to me as I had been to Him. Why should I take Him so seriously when He had not produced everything I thought I should have?

But that was not the approach of Zechariah and Elizabeth. They remained faithful. The facts were that God, too, had remained faithful. His timing was better than theirs. Don’t you ever forget that.

Have you ever played the “what if ” game? I’m at the point of life that I find myself sometimes playing it. My 66 years of age doesn’t meet the full definition of being elderly, although I’ve qualified for an AARP card for the last sixteen years and take advantage of the “senior citizen” pass­es to the movies.

The fact is, I am old enough to do a lot of reflecting on the last 66 years. What if our family had not moved from Boston to Chicago when I was fourteen? What if I had decided to go into politics instead of the ministry? What if I had not led that trip around the world in 1963 for Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and met Anne in Taiwan? What if she had gone on and married the man to whom she was engaged? What if I had gone straight on for a Ph.D. instead of taking that call to be Associate Pastor in Tulsa? What if we’d have accepted any one of several opportunities that have come our way in the past 29 years?

Do you raise questions like these? Why do we do this more the older we get? The reason is that life is funneling us down now, isn’t it? The older we get, the fewer choices we have left. We are more deter­mined to make what’s left count.

Sometimes we wonder what it would have been like if we had not limited our­selves or God had limited us to these envi­ronmental factors that hem us in. How easy it is for us to forget that, for the Christian, everything up to this very moment in time is prologue. God is not finished with me. He’s in the process this very day of doing precisely what He wants to do in and through you and me. Perhaps it’s not quite as romantic as we dreamed.

I heard about an elderly gentleman who had serious hearing problems for many years. He went to the doctor and received a set of hearing aids that allowed the gentle­man to hear 100%. When the elderly gen­tleman went back in a month the doctor said, “Your hearing is perfect. Your family must be really pleased that you can hear again.” The gentleman replied, “Oh, I haven’t told my family yet. I just sit around and listen to the conversations. I’ve changed my will three times!”