The Teaching of the Years

"The years teach much which the days never knew."  I was more asleep than awake when those words from a very slow movie woke me up.  The movie was more than a little boring and I am not sure why I stayed with it so long. Maybe I stayed with it to hear those few words which resonated with the life experience of this old preacher who is straining toward another decade.  What most of us would like is a "do over" on some parts of our life, or maybe even one of golf's mulligans, but, alas, none are available.  

I have often thought that I wish the old version of me could go back and tell the young version of me some things about living, but of course, such thinking is an exercise in futility.  It is not just the old who are guilty of getting set in their ways, but the young as well.  When I look back to the early days of my faith in Christ, I know now that I thought I knew more than I knew.  I needed things to be black and white, right and wrong, and able to be figured out.  I know now that the world has more gray in it than I ever saw and that there is more that I do not know about God than I ever thought I knew about Him.  

Probably, the biggest and most important thing the years have taught that I often did not see while living some its days was the abundance of God's grace.  Life is not about what we do.  It is not about all the noteworthy things we have in our resume or obituary, but about grace.  Life is about grace.  Life is grace.  I wish I had learned this sooner.  The essence of the Creator God is in all of us.  All of us.  It took some days to get it, but the years have finally driven it home.