quayside ministry

A crowd of Hebrideans waving goodbye to their countrymen who are emigrating to Canada on board the 'Matagama'

Never forget the oldies!

The words were addressed to myself by a woman I'd not met before. She was in a local Nursing Home, where I was conducting (as perhaps twice a year I do) a half-hour service this afternoon.

We hadn't met, as I say. So her comments were not directed at all in a personal way at myself. They were more by way of reflection.

How easy it is, she was feeling, for a person like her to become overnight an out-of-sight-and-therefore-out-of-mind displaced statistic in the church's life.

She'd been involved for many a year in a thriving Christian fellowship in town. The emphasis now, though, she felt, was all on youth.

She wasn't bitter. She wasn't at all unsympathetic to the care we must have for the rising generations in society today. Anything but. She saw the urgent need there is for reaching out in Jesus' name to those who now have often not an inkling of just what it's all about.

But don't forget us older folk! We have needs as well.

Considerable needs.

Our earthly lives are largely all behind us now. The tireless fount of energy we once enjoyed has largely all dried up. Our movements are restricted, our horizons all fore-shortened.

A whole new way of living life is forced upon us now. And death has ceased to be a distant sort of subject for discussion, and now is something stalking us each day.

The youth of today may have choices to make. But this lady I was speaking with, and those who are her contemporaries today - there is for them a very final journey they're embarking on. And down there at the quayside of their earthly life, embarking on their ship of emigration to another, unknown world, they need fresh re-assurance and encouragement.

She was right, of course.

The challenge I face is not in remembering the 'oldies': I'm always aware of their needs. The challenge is finding the time for them all, since there are these days so many now thronging that quayside.

Today was a good illustration of just how extended and stretched I can quickly become.

I'd just come back from the primary school where I'd been at the assembly and had spoken with the Head about my starting up the SU group again: I was due now to meet with the SU person who covers this side of the town. It was another of those one-thing-after-another sort of mornings.

Then a call came in from the hospital. An elderly lady, whose husband had died not long back, who's not been all that well herself, and whom I'd arranged I would see later on today - she'd been taken in to the hospital. A doctor dealing in palliative care was on the phone. The lady had hours, not days, to live.

The shift from a focus on all we're concerned to be doing with the youth and the children here, to the needs of a woman well up in years now lying and breathing her last - it's a fairly major gear change in the motor car of ministry.

For the second time this morning I got soaked to the skin as I beat a hasty path along to the hospital. The daughter was there - about to face grief and bereavement a second time when the loss of her father a month or so back is still such a raw and very much un-healed wound. The brother of the dying woman was also there, along with his wife.

To sit beside a person on their deathbed, and to seek to bring the grace of Jesus Christ upon her life, is a privilege beyond all words.

Never forget the oldies!

I'm down at the quayside a lot, I suppose. Supporting, assuring, encouraging those who are gathering there with the final emigration on their minds.

However much the prospect of a better world inspires our hearts, there's a pain involved for one and all. The parting isn't easy.

In the dim and distant past when I used to strum a guitar and pretend to be some sort of up and coming folk singer, I recall playing a song called 'The Leaving of Liverpool', which has the lines -

It's not the leaving of Liverpool which grieves me

But my darling when I think of thee

The prospect is great. But the parting is hard.

That 'quayside' ministry to an older generation is a privileged, vital work.