falling apart

St Kilda cottages

I'm falling apart!

Now before you rush to your phone, your lap-top, or your writing pad - or whatever your chosen mode of communication may be - to convey your concern and support, let me say that these were not my words.

They're the words of a man I met in the shop this afternoon. It's a while since I've seen the man who must be up in his eighties now, and I asked him how he was.

"I'm falling apart!" was the response that he gave. He's feeling his age (as we say). It's not easy.

There's a sense in which it's true of us all, to some extent or another. We're all slowly falling apart.

"Outwardly we are wasting away," wrote one of the early disciples. He meant physically. Lines across your forehead, wrinkled skin, stiff joints, growing breathlessness, failing organs. That sort of thing.

When the psalmist says that by God's grace "your youth is renewed like the eagle's" he doesn't mean that the physical stuff which goes with our growing old somehow magically doesn't happen. We're never to think we all end up as permanent Peter Pans.

We do grow old. And it's hard. Because more and more we're conscious of ... well, falling apart, as that gracious and godly man put it to me today.

I see that every day. Not just in myself, but in the people that I'm with. Often they're more and more struggling with failing health and aches and pains. One thing after another.

An elderly man, a widower now for some years, who used to be a fine, athletic gentleman, but is now reduced to a chair in his home for most of the time, unable to walk more than just a few paces, and losing his balance and falling and ending up now in the hospital.

Falling apart. It's hard. For him and for his family.

A younger woman, also in a hospital, her body the field where a harvest of ailments have slowly been growing these past many years, and just now recovering from some surgery.

It's hard. We are wasting away. Outwardly at least. There's no getting away from that.

The good news of Jesus doesn't hold out the offer of any quick fix: some abracadabra healing that makes it all right in an instant, and takes all the hardship away.

That would be magic. Not gospel.

The gospel has a longer fuse. A slow-burning fuse, painfully slow, which far down the line explodes with the glory of a great and final resurrection day.

It's that for which we're waiting.

"Inwardly," wrote the apostle - "inwardly, we are being renewed day by day." The fuse has been lit in the depths of our souls and is burning its way to a glorious explosion of grace.

"Our light and momentary troubles," the guy continued - and you can see that this is all very relative: they certainly don't seem either light or momentary at all to us, they seem the very opposite, sometimes unbearably heavy and interminably long: "our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory which far outweighs them all."

Fix your eyes on that. Remember that. That's what lies ahead.

The lady in the hospital today was speaking of the comfort which she found in words she had remembered from a song - "What a faithful God we have."

That's the bottom line, of course. God is faithful. We can bank on that. We can invest in the future he's promised, way beyond the varying, trying troubles of this time.

I'm falling apart. That's true. But the fuse has been lit and far down the line the grace of my great and resurrecting God will explode and at last we shall all be raised, restored, perfected.

We're all of us falling apart. In all sorts of ways.

I was seeing later on a woman whose mind is now falling apart. That's hard as well. For her and for her family. The fabric of her erstwhile mental faculties simply coming apart with the illness we calll dementia.

Outwardly, yes, again, a woman who's falling apart. The gospel doesn't stop that painful slide. It simply lights a long-term fuse, deep down within our crumbling frames, a fuse within our spirits which will issue in a final resurrection at the last.

The Spirit of God is given to us. Deep down within. "A deposit, guaranteeing what is to come."

That's all we have to fall back on as we're slowly falling apart.

Of course, there are other ways that we fall apart as well. Not just in terms of our bodies and minds. But the whole broad moral fabric of our lives - that, too, can fall apart. When we get things wrong and make a mess and when everything seems against us.

At night I was learning of such a situation. More common by far than we choose to presume.

Falling apart when there's nothing at all to fall back on. Perhaps that's the hardest thing of all.

Staring into the void. A bottomless pit. Dark and full of despair.

Is there really a God at all? And if there is, how come he's ever let me get into the mess I'm in?

We were studying at night a parable Jesus told. The father and his two lost sons. Young men whose lives had one way and another (and they were very different ways) simply fallen quite apart. And how the younger son at last began the long way back. And how before he was even near his home ("a long way off"), before he'd barely begun to speak the lines he'd long rehearsed - how he found himself enveloped in his father's outspread arms.

A man who was falling apart discovering there was still a future. That's the gospel.

I'm falling apart. I can't get away from that.

But I have got a future now.