PERILOUS PROM [F, 5-22-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—PERILOUS PROM [F, 5-22-26]

 

Yes, I’ve told this story before, but it’s prom season, and, as I have also said before, this column no longer makes any pretense of being useful to anyone but me…

I think it was Mike who first told me that I was taking Judith to the prom at Ft. Branch, 20 miles from my home town of Oakland City. It was news to me. I had never heard of her.

Judith was the only child in a wealthy family. Her father was a judge. Her parents had given her a new Chrysler convertible at the start of the school year. That guaranteed that no Ft. Branch boy would date her, since no Ft. Branch boy had a car that could compete. So as prom time approached, she was dateless.

Judith’s mother was a friend of Ann’s mother. Ann was in my high school class. Judith’s mother told Ann’s mother of the prom date problem. Ann’s mother asked what Judith was interested in.

“Journalism. She’s editor of the school newspaper.

“Have I got a deal for you,” said Ann’s mother. “My daughter is in class with the editor of our school newspaper. He’s a nice boy.”

That’s the curse all the mothers always put on me: He’s a nice boy.

So Ann’s mother and Judith’s mother decided I would take Judith to the prom. The irony is that I was poorer and further out of my league than any boy in Ft. Branch. My family didn’t have a car of any kind.

Judith’s mother told her that she had a prom date with me, a boy she’d never heard of. Ann’s mother told Ann, and Ann told Mike, and Mike told me.

I had no way to get to Ft. Branch, to take Judith to the prom, so the mothers arranged for Mike and Ann to get invitations to that prom, too. How, I have no idea, but in a small town, the mother of the judge’s daughter can usually get whatever she wants.

I had nothing to wear to a prom, so my sister, who had graduated and was working fulltime, bought me a suit, and a pink and gray tie, which I still have. [You don’t outgrow ties.] Ann’s mother, of course, knew all about Judith’s dress, so she bought a corsage that would coordinate with it.

When the great night came, Mike and Ann drove down the gravel roads to our farm to pick me up, and I rode to Ft. Branch in the back seat of Mike’s two-door hardtop Pontiac. Since Ann’s mother had bought the corsage for Judith, it rode in the front seat beside Ann. When we arrived at Judith’s house, Ann scrunched up toward the dashboard so that I could push the seat down to get out…forgetting about the corsage, which got flatly crushed.

It was a big house, fronted by a high porch with a dim light. I carried the crushed corsage up the long walk and climbed the creaking steps to the shadowed front door. I knocked. The door opened. A classy blond girl in a formal stood there. I spoke one of the best opening lines in the annals of blind prom dates: “It looks like I’ve come to the right place.”

I pushed the crushed corsage at her. She looked at it and was speechless. An older blond appeared over her shoulder, took the corsage away to the kitchen, where she performed voodoo on it. Judith and I stood there and tried not to look at each other. “That’s my father,” she said, indicating a man sitting in a dark corner of the living room, peeling an apple, with a butcher knife, one long peel sliding off the apple with surgical precision. He didn’t say anything.

Judith’s mother returned with the sort-of repaired corsage, and taking no chances that her daughter might get crushed, too, pinned it on Judith herself. She handed Judith a boutonniere. Judith tried to slip it through the button-hole of my new lapel. It wouldn’t go. The mother tried. “It’s not cut,” she said. [What farm boy knows you have to slit the buttonhole in a new suit yourself?]

“I’ll take care of him,” her father said, jumping up and advancing on me with the butcher knife. He grabbed my lapel and began to saw at it, the knife an inch from my throat. He was really good with that thing. The slit was perfect, and Judith slipped the flower into it.

I don’t remember much from that point. I assumed my job was to make the Ft. Branch boys jealous, since Judith must have gotten such a much better date, because she had to go out of town to get one, and out-of-town is always better, so I acted mysterious, which meant I spent the evening telling Judith stories of editing our school newspaper, while Mike and Ann danced. The only thing I remember for sure was that I mispronounced the word “intricate,” while explaining my reasons for eschewing all dances but the “bunny hop.”

I never saw or heard of Judith again.

It’s important when looking back on such experiences to find the good in an otherwise disastrous event. I have done so, and it’s this:  I’m sure Judith won the contest among the Sisters of Perpetual Responsibility for who had the best reason to become a nun.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

AFTER THE PILL [W, 5-20-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Observations of An Old Optimist—AFTER THE PILL [W, 5-20-26]

 

Of all the major changes/inventions of the last 70 years, I think that the birth control pill is the most significant—yes, more than computers and the internet and nuclear bombs and toaster ovens. The birth control pill changed the very basis of society—marriage and family.

I was a campus minister when the Stonewall Uprising occurred in 1969, and gay folks began to proclaim, “We’re people, too.” It didn’t make much difference to college students. They were too busy with sex in general to care about gay sex.

Everybody got all hot and bothered in 1975 when Loretta Lynn sang her paean of praise to “The Pill,” but that was fifteen years behind the times to college students.

I began to say to anyone who would listen—and there weren’t many who wanted to—that homosexual sex wasn’t the problem. The real problem was promiscuous sex, recreational sex, meaningless sex, disrespectful sex, which was at least as prevalent among straights as gays.

Nothing wrong with sex, I said. Plenty wrong with using and dehumanizing people, including yourself. Plenty wrong with turning sex upside down, and using the quality that nature gives us to lead us to intimacy in order to avoid intimacy.

The church, I said, needed to develop a sexual ethic beyond “no sex at all except in marriage,” because that horse had left the barn, in 1960, when the FDA approved “the pill.”

Of course, the church’s response was, “Let’s ignore that issue and concentrate on gay stuff, because we can all agree on that, right?” Oh, yes, right.

I first tried preaching a sexual ethic of commitment. No, you didn’t have to be married, but you should be faithful and committed to your partner. That was much too narrow for college students, who figured they needed [wanted] time to experiment before committing, so I went through several other stages until I settled, more or less, on an ethic of respect—we should respect sex, meaning respecting ourselves [Your body is a temple, I Cors 6], respecting the temples of others, and respecting the Creator of sex.

That was too complicated. And cerebral. Sex is not a thought-centered activity. College students liked the idea of respectful sex, as long as it didn’t get in the way of casual lustful promiscuous recreational sex.

And, as I said in the column for May 14, if you want to find out what society in general is going to think and do next, look at what college students are thinking and doing now.

I’m not a campus minister anymore, but I live in a town with 48,626 college students. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but I get the impression that they are starting to get bored with sexual promiscuity. Maybe they really are the brightest generation…

John Robert McFarland

 

 

COUSINS [Late in the day on M, 5-18-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Family Reminiscences of An Old Man—COUSINS [Late in the day on M, 5-18-20]

 

[We ended up staying at the reunion longer than planned, so I did not post early today because I didn’t have my computer with me.]

As we planned the memorial service for my “little” brother, Jim, I invited all our cousins. I realized that it would be the last time I would ever see a cousin. I’m glad that Natalie, oldest daughter of Uncle Bob McFarland, from whom I get my middle name, was the only one who was able to come.

We cousins, on both sides of the family, have always been close. Now, those of us left, we live too far apart. We can’t get on an airplane. We can’t drive. We can’t walk. We can’t remember which color is ours on the Chinese Checkers board. We shall never see each other again.

That seems so strange, for I once had 26 cousins, ten on the Pond side of the family, and sixteen McFarlands.

I said above that I invited all our cousins, but that wasn’t accurate. There are some for whom I have no address. As our adult years went along, some cousins dropped out of the family, either by death or by geography, or by choice. I mourned each time I lost a cousin, especially those who dropped out, because being part of that generation was so important to me.

We cousins were much involved with one another, from the time we were little kids. We visited in each other’s homes, stayed overnight, slept on the floor because there weren’t enough beds. We played tag and baseball. We played Parcheesi and Chinese Cheekers and never-ending games of Monopoly.

I made no distinction between Ponds and McFarlands. To me, the aunts and uncles and cousins were just one family, where I was accepted, where I was encouraged to be a good person.

That was probably aided by my status as the oldest grandson on either side. I never thought of myself more highly than I should have thought, though, because I had an older sister and four older female cousins who made sure I understood there was no primogeniture in our generation.

When my parents reached fifty years of marriage, I decided that we should celebrate by getting the whole family—both sides—together in one place. I rented a church camp in southern Indiana, the place where both families got their start, and invited all their brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews for two days of eating and talking. Almost everyone came. A lot of good relationships got started or expanded, especially among the cousins, some by Ponds who had little previous contact with McFarlands, and vice versa.

In retrospect, I realized I did that as much for me as for my parents. I never thought of myself as just part of my immediate family. Indeed, our immediate family life was so chaotic that I think I always felt a bit outside it; I felt that I was the social worker who needed to solve the family problems rather than being a part of that family. The family that gave me identity was that conglomerate of McFarlands and Ponds who played that eternal game of Chinese Checkers, who gathered that weekend at Temple Hills.

When I first started preaching, at nineteen, I was not surprised that folks in those churches, even older people, thought that I was a competent preacher, because I had so many relatives who had always treated me that way, from the time I was a child. They assumed that I was a good person—not just a good boy-- who was capable of doing good things.

I’ve had to give up almost all of those aunts and uncles. Only Edna, Uncle Mike’s widow, is left, out of that wonderful phalanx of 24 [counting spouses]. But cousins…those are young people…except, now we are not. No more cousins, but so many good memories.

I think a big extended family is a little like heaven. I wonder if they play Chinese Checkers there. I wonder if God cheats, like Grandma Mac did…

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

MY ‘LITTLE’ BROTHER [Sat, 5-16-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Grieving Remembrances of A Big Brother—MY ‘LITTLE’ BROTHER [Sat, 5-16-26]

 

All in all, my brother, Jim, was a strange man. Weird, even. I like to think that he got that from me.

He grew to be two inches taller than I, but he was nine years younger, so, my “little” brother.

He was Jimmy, until he got old enough to be called Jim. I always thought of him, though, as Jimmy. Especially since his death, at the age of 79.

In the photo above, Helen and I are on the left, Jim’s wife, Millie, in the middle, and our daughter, Mary Beth, between Millie and Jim. Notice that Jim is looking at things from a different angle. That was always the way he looked at things.

Even when very young, he showed a different face to the world. We have photos of us four siblings posing together in front of our farm house, for Aunt Dorothy’s box camera, where three of us are smiling, but Jimmy is twisting his face into some contorted mask. Even as a little guy, he didn’t want anyone to see the real him.

That was understandable. He had four “parents,” including a sister 14 years older [Mary Virginia] and a brother 9 years older, telling him what to do, and a sister [Margaret Ann] 18 months older, whose cuteness factor was off the charts. She was hard to compete with for attention. His only chance for individual identity was to draw into himself. He did that his whole life.

His humor was sardonic, a little sarcastic, a little silly, always a bit sideways. He wanted to be different from everyone else, but he didn’t want to be noticed, sort of like a sideline commentator who is off-camera, as is Jim Day on the Cincinnati Reds broadcasts.

He had the great, good fortune to find one of the two women in the world—Milicent Ellard & Helen Karr--who were able to put up with the strange ways of the McFarland brothers, even think those ways were endearing and attractive. Or maybe they thought it was a duty beyond the ability of other women. As the old saying goes, “It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it.”

Jim died last Nov. 1. Tomorrow, Millie, and Helen and our children and grandchildren, and Margey’s children and grandchildren, will gather for a memorial service, along with the few friends and cousins and nieces and nephews who are still alive and able to travel.

I’ll wear the little wooden cross necklace that I bought at Jim’s health food store. He had a friend who made them. I don’t think Jim believed much about the cross, but he tried to help his friend by selling them at the store.

I’ll read the funeral service from the same Book of Worship that I used when I officiated at the marriage service for Jim and Millie, some 60 years ago. Then we’ll share our memories of a man who never wanted to be noticed, who wanted to hide behind a funny face. We’ll honor that.

John Robert McFarland

 

BEYOND THE HALLS OF IVY [R, 5-14-26]

 CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Observations of An Old Trouble Maker—BEYOND THE HALLS OF IVY [R, 5-14-26]

 

Methodist annual conferences will soon meet. The pastoral appointments for the next year will be read out. When I started going to Conference, in 1957, no pastor knew until that reading where they would be the next year. I assumed, though, that my appointment would always be to some congregation.

I never intended to become a campus minister, even though I held campus ministry in high regard. After all, I met Helen at The Wesley Foundation at IU. And I liked universities in general. I loved learning. I loved songs like The Halls of Ivy and Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.

While I was a college student, though, in my sophomore year, I became a parish preacher. Church was as important to me as campus. I assumed that life as a local church pastor would be my career.

Campus ministers were not respected much back then. They were called “student workers.” They were trouble makers who preached about social justice and were always wanting “change.” They were guys [all men, then] who didn’t fit in local churches, so they weren’t real preachers. Many times during my campus ministry years, colleagues would ask me, “When are you going to come back to the ministry?”

Their question was not criticism, but concern, because as a campus minister, you lost your place on the appointment ladder. The “ladder” meant that, as long as you didn’t cause any trouble, each time you were moved to a different church, it would be a little larger and more prestigious. Campus ministry years didn’t count on the ladder. If you “came back to the ministry,” you had to start over at the bottom of the ladder.

Because no one wanted to lose his place on the ladder, the bishop had trouble finding someone willing to be a campus minister.

But I owed Bishop Richard Raines, for getting me out of trouble numerous times, and he knew that I owed him, so when he asked/told me to be the campus minister in Terre Haute [Indiana State U and Rose Polytechnic], I figured I should do that, for a year or two, as payment to him. Also, I was never very smart about anticipating the consequences of my choices.

Campus ministry, though, turned out to be a more significant ministry than I would have had as a local church pastor, for two primary reasons.

First, my influence was much wider than it would have been as a parish pastor. Every year some of my students graduated and scattered to various jobs and towns and churches. They took with them the ideas they had gotten on campus. Even while they were still in school, they went home on the weekends and vacations and enjoyed upsetting their parents and pastors with all the radical stuff they got through their time on campus—stuff about civil rights and voting rights and women’s rights and gay rights and saving the planet and Viet Nam and situational ethics and “contemporary” worship and prayer and faith and Bible interpretation and sacrificial service and the church as the place to have a really good time.

Second, I learned before anyone else what was going to happen next. Whatever society was going to do next, college students were already doing it.

So, if you want to know what’s coming up, look on campus. Strangely, the social observers say that students are going to church more and drinking less. That doesn’t sound right…

John Robert McFarland

UNTOUCHABLES [T, 5-12-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Ramblings of An Old Man—UNTOUCHABLES [T, 5-12-26]

 

It was our soph or junior year in high school. As I approached a group of boys in the hallway, Louis Simpson looked up and said, quite good-naturedly, “We’ve got to stop telling dirty jokes now; John’s here.”

I don’t think they were actually telling dirty jokes. It was just a way of acknowledging me as an untouchable, someone who didn’t belong in the real world.

Of course, the very fact that to this day I think they were not telling dirty jokes may tell you why I was an untouchable. Untouchables are naive. That’s part of how we are set aside from the real world.

Some real-world people try to take advantage of untouchables, use our naiveite against us. But—if you’re lucky, as I’ve always been—folks protect you, because they know you need it 

I remember seeing movies and TV shows called “The Untouchables,” about America in the 1920s, when politics and the economy were much as they are now, when enough bribe money can get you anything, regardless of the law. Enter Eliot Ness and his special police, called unofficially “The Untouchables,” because they could not be bought or bribed.

I guess I was that sort of untouchable, in a minor way, except no one ever tried to bribe me, anyway. No, I wasn’t an Eliot Ness sort of untouchable. I was not pure of heart, like Ness. I didn’t even need to be pure of heart. I was untouchable because people protected me. I was in a tiny niche of society that not only did not get its hands dirty but that didn’t even know how to get dirty hands.

I am part of the 2%. Not the way that is usually used, the 2% that has all the money and power, and abhors the rest of us as untouchable because we are, compared to them, poor and powerless.

No, I’m in that 2% that has always, without knowing it, led a charmed life. Because others protected us from the real world.

That does not mean, of course, that we two-percenters have no bad days. I’ve had cancer. People I love have had cancer. Good friends have suffered, and died too soon. I’ve had to be a comfort in tragedy when the tragedy was so bad that comfort wasn’t even possible; that’s hard.

Friend Kathy Roberts says that she has a face that says, “Tell me weird things.” I think I have a face that says, “Don’t tell me bad things.”

Now, again, that isn’t literally true. Indeed, my profession was listening to people tell me bad things. But it was bad things about themselves. it wasn’t bad things that involved me. I was just a listener, not a participant.

That distance, though, was one of the traits that made me a fairly good pastor. In that sense, I was a Ness type of untouchable. Since folks knew I wasn’t going to get lost in the jungle with them, I might be able to show them a way out.

Sometimes I feel a conflicted about being an untouchable. I didn’t like being excluded from that group of laughing boys, the ones telling the dirty jokes. But I feel grateful that they protected me. Being an untouchable has made my life so easy. I hope you are an untouchable, too.

John Robert McFarland

“Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.” Fred Astaire, via The Writer’s Almanack.

 

 

MOTHER’S’ DAY [Su, 5-10-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reflections of A Doddering Old Man—MOTHER’S’ DAY [Su, 5-10-26]

 

Today is Mother’s Day, or Mothers’ Day, according to how many mothers you are trying to honor. Both singular and plural were always a problem for me. Not a life-shaking problem, but a problem I had trouble solving.

Mothers’ Day I dealt with primarily as a preacher. I looked out on the congregation on this special day and saw mothers whom I knew were not going to have a happy day. And I saw others, of so many ages, who felt guilt or anger about their mothers. If I were sensitive at all, I didn’t plow ahead with a Hallmark Mothers’ Day sermon. But what else to do?

I was relieved of my guilt, slightly, in my early churches, because the women of the church who were in charge of such things--either by tradition or acceptance or audacity—decided how we would celebrate the day.

I was disconcerted at my first Mothers’ Day Sunday, when I was 20 years old, when flowers were passed out to the mothers at the door following the service, but only mothers. I mean, all churches back then had lots of women who were not mothers. They were reminded of that as they left the church without a flower.

By the time I retired, usually flowers were pressed into the hands of every woman as she left worship on Mothers’ Day, whether she wanted one or not. An adequate solution… well, not really. They/we justified that on the premise that every woman has a mother, even if she is not one. But so does every man there, so where does that leave us? Still kind of up in the air.

As far as Mother’s Day is concerned, I never had any trouble honoring my mother. I loved her. She loved me. But she was a puzzle and trial to me all sixty years we shared. The problem was inconsistency. As a child, the rules of conduct changed all the time, sometimes within the minute. As an adult, she would ask for help and then at the last minute veto everything we had agreed on, always for some fallacious and ridiculous reason.

Don’t worry; I know she did the best she could to be a good mother, and I did the best I could [with a lot of help from Helen] to be a good son.

The mother-child relationship is fraught with… well, everything. No relationship more important, or more difficult and complex. A flower hardly does justice to the depth of that relationship. Neither does Red Lobster shrimp. But they are good symbols. They represent beauty and nourishment. Those are the things that are necessary for life. Just as mothers are.

John Robert McFarland

LUTHER’S REVENGE [F, 5-8-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Ramblings of a Finally Humble Old Man—LUTHER’S REVENGE [F, 5-8-26]

 

Whenever I trudge my daily mile, I always think of Luther White, the father of my great, late friend, Bill.

Bill and I were campus ministry colleagues. We often met to drink coffee and talk about our work. And our families. I never met Luther, but Bill used to brag about his father, specifically how he still walked a mile each day, even though he was 90. I would nod my head in affirmation, but secretly, I was thinking, “A mile? That’s nothing. Anyone should be able to walk a mile, at any age.” That was 60 years ago.

I wasn’t quite as ignorant as that sounds, nor as arrogant. But I had been a walker all my life, especially when we lived on the farm and had no car. I walked many miles, all the time, in all kinds of weather. Walking a mile just didn’t sound to me like an unusual achievement.

Now, in my 90^th year, one of my major ambitions is to walk a mile on my next birthday, and then look up at the sky [Yes, that’s where heaven is; didn’t you go to Sunday school?] and say to Luther White, “Okay. Now I understand.”

I call it Luther’s Revenge, this new humility that old age has brought upon me. [It would be a good book title, too, except that most folks would think it refers to the 16^th century church reformer instead of the 20^th century high school music teacher.]

Most of us assume that we won’t get any more decrepit than we are right now. Yes, we know we’ll grow older. Yes, we even know that our bodies are going to keep sliding down the slippery slope [sometimes literally!] In our brains we know better, but we assume that we’ll forever be able to do whatever we are doing today. More slowly, yes, but surely the day won’t come when we can’t even get up off the toilet by ourselves. And, yet, we all know someone for whom that day did come. So, why do we think we shall be spared?

When my father was close to the end of his life, at age 96, Helen and I took him to his favorite restaurant, for his favorite steak and gravy. He ate less than half of it. As we helped him out the restaurant door after we had finished, he could not get his legs to work to make the one small step down from the door to the sidewalk. One of us on each side, we had to lift him down. He sighed and said, “I didn’t know you could get this bad off and still be alive.”

As Luther White walked one morning, he was hit by a passing car and killed. Some folks would say that God directed that car, to save Luther the indignity of getting too old. I’m not one of those people.

But if you are driving in the Sherwood Green neighborhood someday, and you see a nattily dressed old man trudging along in shorts--even though it’s 20 degrees, but the belt was already in his shorts, and he didn’t want to go to the trouble of changing it to his flannel-lined cargo pants--it’s okay to offer him a ride. He’s now humble enough to accept it.

John Robert McFarland

No, that's not a photo of me. I use a black, wooden cane that once was Uncle Ted's.

GROWING UP IS A DISEASE [W, 5-6-26]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of A Failed Grown-Up—GROWING UP IS A DISEASE [W, 5-6-26]

 

My highly competent and distinguished colleague, Rev. Randy Robinson, told me, as he was getting to retire, that when he was a young pastor, he looked up to me as one of “the fathers of the church.” Oh, if he had only known.

Makes me think of a continuing ed conference I attended. The main speaker was a newly elected bishop. The president of the near-by seminary had gone to the airport to pick him up. They had been students together earlier at a different seminary. “Hello, Bishop,” said the president. “Hello, President,” said the bishop.

The seminary president said, “Then we laughed like hyenas and finally said, ‘Where are the grown-ups when you really need them!’”

When you get to my age, you know that there are only two kinds of people: Those who think they are grown up but aren’t. And those who know they are not but are still trying to become grownups…

…or maybe a third type: Those who have given up on ever growing up.

As the saying goes, “Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is not.”

When I was a nineteen-year-old, preaching at three different churches every Sunday, I thought I was quite grown up. After all, I had the backing of the church. Why would the District Superintendent subject those poor people to my pulpit ponderings if I were not grown up?

Growing up is a disease, and I had an early-onset version of it. I had to grow up young. I became a major financial support of my family in my teens. I dropped out of high school to work in a factory to get my family off of welfare. Older people in those days respected that sort of thing. They praised me, and talked to me like I was one of them, like a grown-up . I had no way of knowing then that most of them were not grown up, even though they looked and talked like they were.

There were hints. Old men who whistled at young girls. Old church ladies who laughed at fart jokes. Old preachers who told those jokes.

But I assumed those were anomalies. When I got old, I was sure that I would not do things like tell waitresses and store clerks that I qualified for the good-looks discount, because I did not do that sort of thing when I was young.

I was a grown-up for a long time.

I finally got over being grown-up. I think it was my cancer surgery and year of chemotherapy that did it. My first oncologist predicted that I would live no more than “a year or two.” That sort of sobers you up. I realized how much of my life I had wasted, being a grown up.

So, I’ve given up on growing up. It’s too much trouble, and not much fun. As Jesus said, “I’m here. Let’s party.” [John 10:10.]

John Robert McFarland

“Let us read and dance—two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.” Voltaire

SECRET DOWNSIZING [M, 5-4-26]

 CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—SECRET DOWNSIZING [M, 5-4-26]

 

It’s spring-cleaning time, which includes getting rid of stuff we don’t need.

A daughter told us of some people who wanted to downsize. They hit upon a novel approach. Whenever they went to someone’s house, for a meal or party, they would take along something they wanted to get rid of and leave it secretly with their host. It was a slow process. They could take only small items, like silverware. While innocently in the kitchen, ostensibly just to get a drink of water, they would slip a table knife into their host’s silverware drawer. If they went to the bathroom, they’d leave an extra tooth brush in the medicine cabinet. While browsing the book shelves, they’d slip in a copy of The Declaration Decoded, by Katie Kennedy. [No, it’s an excellent book, but small format—easily smuggled.]

I’m a bit reluctant to tell about this. Most of you live far enough away that we need not fear extra spatulas or cans of tuna or copies of Winning Bigly appearing in our house. Some of you, however, actually do come to our house from time to time. Yes, we appreciate the muffins, and the Billy Collins books, but don’t think you can get away with leaving one of those little jars of cumquat jam, or the autobiography of Kristi Noem!

When you’re in the process of downsizing, it can be difficult to remember what you’ve gotten rid of and what you still have.

From time to time we go looking for something that we gave away. Recently Helen was befuddled by the absence of a spring decoration that she wanted to put out on the mantle, something she puts up every year. No where could it be found. She complained to friend Kathy. “I know where it is,” said Kathy. “It’s on my mantle…”

Helen had given it to Kathy, along with some other stuff she wanted to get rid of, to put into her church’s fall rummage sale. Kathy, though, liked it so much that she kept it. It has now passed back through our house and on to daughter Mary Beth’s mantle. At least, I think that’s where it is now.

Downsizing is a major concern of old people. [Unless you are a hoarder, but that’s a different sort of problem.] We spend so many years acquiring, building up our resources—furniture, books, kitchenware, clothes, suitcases, tools, office supplies... Then, suddenly [it seems like], we have little need of most of that stuff. We try to give it away, but nobody wants good china or silverware, button-front shirts, hard-sided suitcases, pencils, typewriters, lined 3-hole paper…

There’s lots of stuff that even rummage stores like Good Will won’t take, because customers don’t want it.

I guess the only alternative is to take those things to other people’s houses and slip them in unnoticed, like the way those people from the first paragraph did.

If you were going to do this, slip things unnoticed into the homes of other people, what would the items be, and at whose house?

We don’t go anyplace, so we can’t get rid of stuff that way, so I’m trying to figure out what I can sneak into the pockets of people who come to our house. That dining room table is going to be a problem…

John Robert McFarland

 

WHAT WAS YOUR GRANDFATHER LIKE? [Sa, 5-2-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Personal Identity of An Elderly Grandson—WHAT WAS YOUR GRANDFATHER LIKE? [Sa, 5-2-26]

 

Michelle Obama said I was doing it wrong.

Starting in high school, I was pleased with, yes, even proud of, my ability to remember names. This hit its zenith in my campus ministry years.

College kids went to church in those days. Every September, I’d have a thousand new names to learn. I just happened into the plan I used to remember them. I asked their name, asked their major, and asked their home town. And at each answer, I pointed out something we had in common: “Oh, my grandmother’s name is Margaret, too… Jim Kiefer is a special ed major, too. You’d probably like to meet him…” [If the student were a guy, it would be “Ann Wierman is a special ed major…”] You’re from Illiopolis… so Gary Ford is your pastor?” By that time, I was associating their name not just with their face but a standard background important to understanding a student—a major and a hometown.

There is a difference, of course, between just trying to remember a person’s name and trying to get to know them, to know their story. Yes, their name is a short form of their story, and remembering it is a good place to start, but knowing a name and knowing a story are not the same thing.

Michelle Obama, in the film about the tour for her book, Becoming, talking to a group of students, said, “The way you get to know someone is not the surface things, like where they’re from. Ask what their grandfather was like…”

I’m inclined to say, “Well, I’d eventually get around to their grandfather, later, after I got through trying to remember 999 other students…” The truth, though, is that I don’t think I ever asked anyone what their grandfather was like.

If someone wanted to know me, grandmothers would be a better place to start, but asking about my grandfathers would be intriguing, in part because my mother’s father, Elmer Arthur Pond, was dead when I was born, killed in a coal mine cave-in a decade before. I wish I knew more about what he was like.

The strange thing is, he’s been a major part of my life, because I have spent so much time wondering about him, what he was like…and because of three things I do know…

First, my father said that Grandpa Pond was always interested in what other people thought. He would listen carefully as you talked.

Second, my mother was the outlier among his eight children, the “sensitive” one, the one who needed extra attention. He gave her the extra attention she needed.

Third, he was killed because he knew the mine was unsafe, but the owner insisted the miners go in anyway. Grandpa told the other miners to stand back, that he would go in first.

So, yes, you might learn about me by asking me about the grandfather I never knew, because I wanted to be like him.

John Robert McFarland

The photo is generic; not of my grandfather.

 

 

SECRETARIES [R, 4-30-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Personal Reminiscences of An Old Boss—SECRETARIES [R, 4-30-26]

 

Susan looked up as I came into the office. She was smiling, as much as she ever did. “Okay,” she said. “You can fire me now.”

“Good,” I said, “You’re fired.” She picked up her coat off the filing cabinet, where she had thrown it, haphazardly, the way she did everything, and walked out. I never saw her again.

I had tried to fire her about six weeks earlier. She was just atrociously poor as a secretary. I should never have hired her, but when the former secretary quit without notice, I needed someone in a hurry, and there were only two applicants. One was a fantastic young woman. She would have been a perfect church secretary. But she told me upfront that she could be in the job for only six months. She was getting married in six months and would be moving to the city of her husband’s new job.

So, I took Susan. I didn’t want to go through the hiring process again in six months. I mean, how bad could Susan be? Well, the worst! To make it worse than worst, she thought she was the best! She often told me, “I’m nineteen years old. I don’t need you telling me how to spell stuff.” It was true; “stuff” was the one word she could spell. Then she would misspell every other word.

Why did I put up with her? Well, I just wasn’t very good at dealing with “employees.” I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. And I didn’t want people to be mad at me. It was just easier to work around the mistakes of a secretary or the negligence of a janitor…

…until the congregation begins to complain that the board minutes are incomprehensible again, or that there is no toilet paper in the women’s rest room.

Everybody who ever came to the office complained about Susan. That’s why I tried to fire her the first time. Bit she said, “No, that’s not convenient for me right now. I’ll let you know when it’s okay to fire me.”

Now, any other boss, any other minister, even, would not have put up with that. But I figured it was easier to go along.

I’ve had 14 different secretaries over the years. Most were adequately competent. Two were atrociously bad. Five were great. To my credit, the five great ones were all my hires. I’m not sure, though, that Anne and Jeanne and Mary and Rose and Frances, all together, can compensate for hiring Susan.

And even one of those good ones was on the job because I was a namby-pamby boss.

After the Susan fiasco, I thought I would go back to my Hoopeston, IL plan. There, I hired two women to share one job. Rose took mornings and Frances took afternoons. Each did whatever came up. They filled in for each other. They barely knew each other when I hired them, but they became best friends with each other, and with Helen and our daughters, too.

So I decided I would do the morning-afternoon split when I started the post-Susan hiring process. If one of them turned out to be a Susan, at least I would have a Rose or Frances the rest of the day.

There were quite a few applicants this time. Jeanne was inexperienced but was clearly a quick learner, and she had the right personality for a church office. I told her that she could have either morning or afternoon. “That won’t work for me,” she said. “I need to work fulltime. I’ll just take both morning and afternoon.”

Having learned nothing from the Susan fiasco, I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Okay.”

After me, Jeanne stayed on the job through six more preachers. They all thanked me for hiring her. “It’s one of my better skills,” I said.

If you need to hire a secretary, I’m available as a consultant.

John Robert McFarland

I meant to post this column on April 22, National Secretary Day, but now it’s called National Professional Administrators’ Day, so I missed it. I apologize to all the Professional Administrators, except Susan.

 

 

 

THE PROXY IN THE STORY [T, 4-28-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Theology of An Old Reader—THE PROXY IN THE STORY [T, 4-28-26]

 

In every story, there is a character who is the proxy for the reader. The reader may not know it. Even the author may not know who it is. It may not be some character with whom the reader identifies. Indeed, the reader may not even like that character. But the proxy character brings the reader into the story and walks through it with them, often more in spirit than in action.

Jesus is the proxy for the reader in the story God is writing.

We don’t see the author of a story. That worthy individual is hidden behind words and pages. Indeed, it’s usually a shock when we see the author’s photo in the back flyleaf of the book. He doesn’t look like the author of The Dainty Diaries. She doesn’t look like someone who would write The Corn Flakes Killer. [Cereal killer; get it?]

[Note to author: it’s not funny if you have to explain it.]

But you can get some hints about who the author is, and how she thinks. Maybe even where he lives, or where she shops, or what flowers he likes. That’s true of God, too. We get hints about who God is and what God wants by paying attention to how God writes the universal story.

[Reminds me of the kid who was coloring in Sunday School. “What are you doing, Billy?” the teacher asked. “Making a picture of God,” he said. “But no one knows what God looks like,” she protested. “They will now,” he said.]

We understand the story best, though--not only understand it but get into it ourselves--through the proxy character. In the Gospel story, that is Jesus. He is the go-between, between the author and the reader.

Our omnivorous reader friend, Dow Cooksey, used to say, when he gave up on a book half-way through, “There just wasn’t any character in the story that I could care about.”

The good thing about Jesus is that he is easy to care about. Even if you are a Muslim, you respect Jesus as an important prophet. Even if you are an atheist, you respect Jesus as a teacher of ethics. Even if you are a drunk, you respect Jesus for turning water into wine.

That’s why Jesus is the Christ.

Christ is not Jesus’ surname. It’s a job title. It means he’s the proxy in the Story. Not just the Christian story. Not just the Bible story. God’s story.

I heard of an African who read the New Testament for the first time. When asked what she thought, she said, “That man, Jesus? He is good medicine.”

John Robert McFarland

“The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.” Ludwig Wittgenstein. [Wittgenstein is one of my favorite philosophers because he helped me get an A in a graduate statistics course. I knew nothing of the math of stats, but I gave an incomprehensible oral report on Wittgenstein, so the prof and other students assumed I was smart.]

 

THE WORLD’S GREATEST COLLEGE SCHOLARSHIP [Su, 4-26-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of An Old College Student—THE WORLD’S GREATEST COLLEGE SCHOLARSHIP [Su, 4-26-26]

 

Yesterday was the 75^th running of The Little 500 bicycle race at Indiana University. It is called The World’s Greatest College Weekend. It mimics the Indianapolis 500 auto race, which takes place just 50 miles up the road. Even if you live outside of Indiana, you’ve probably seen or heard about The Little 500, through Steve Tesich’s film, Breaking Away, which delightfully tells the story of the unlikely Cutters, a team of mis-fit local kids, winning the whole thing.

I heard the film actress, Tan Kheng Hua, known for her role in Crazy Rich Asians, tell of how she came to study at IU. She said, “I was a Chinese girl in Singapore who spoke no English. I wasn’t interested in going to college or going to America. The only place I wanted to go was the mall. But at the cinema at the mall, I saw a film called Breaking Away, and I wanted to go swim in a quarry with Dennis Quaid...”

That’s how far The Little 500 is known, because of that film.

 

The IU Student Foundation started the race as a way of making money for scholarships for poor kids who had to work their way through college. I can’t remember exactly how they did the metrics, but the student who had the combination of the best grades and the most hours worked got the first scholarship each year, and also got their photo in the publicity for subsequent races. 70 years ago, I was that student.

We got even more publicity than usual that year, because of the runner-up. At the awards ceremony, we sat in order of achievement. I was in the first chair, so the runner-up was seated beside me. We had a good time getting acquainted, and the press thought it was hilarious, and took lots of photos of us, for the winner was a preacher, and the runner-up was a bar tender. We both worked a lot of hours to cancel out the other’s work. Or so the idea went.

That would hardly cause a ripple these days. Folks would say, “What’s strange about that?” After all, the preacher at our church does a weekly study session called “Pub Theology” that, yes, meets at a pub, where the preacher drinks what the bar tender serves, while they talk about how to be followers of Christ. [Lest there be a misunderstanding, not our current preacher.]

But 70 years ago, if you were talking preachers and bartenders, “…never the twain shall meet.”

I never saw my runner-up friend again, since he didn’t go to my church, and I didn’t go to his bar, but I hope he got as much out of that scholarship as I did.

John Robert McFarland

 

WHEN LIFE BEGINS [F, 4-24-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Observations of a Not Dead Husband—WHEN LIFE BEGINS [F, 4-24-26]

 

Helen and I were chatting with Barbara after church. Well, it was mostly Helen and Barbara chatting, with me standing there.

“Life doesn’t really begin until your husband dies,” Barbara said.

Then she remembered that a husband was standing right there. She was slightly flustered, but not really embarrassed. After all, she was telling the truth.

Barbara was born at the end of the 19^th century. She spent most of her life assisting her husband’s life. That’s what women did then. [That’s what a lot of them do now.]

As Helen has famously said, “Most men enter assisted living the day they get married.”

When Barbara’s husband died, she got a chance to live her own life. Barbara wasn’t glad her husband’s life was over. She was glad hers had started.

I saw a sign recently [online] that said, “The beginning is near.” It’s a neat reversal of the sign that usually shows up in comic strips, with some robed and sandaled guru-type proclaiming, “The end is near.”

The end-is-near signs are telling us: you’d better prepare for the end of life. The beginning-is-near sign says that we need to prepare for life to get started.

Reminds me of the story of the young man who returned from military service and was inquiring about folks in his old neighborhood… “Is Old Man Brown alive yet?” “No, not yet.”

I’m not going to say, “You’d better enjoy today because you don’t know what tomorrow will bring.” We already know that. But whatever tomorrow brings, it won’t be just a loss, just an ending. It will also be a beginning.

It might not be the beginning we want, but it will be the one we have.

Mourn the losses. They are real. They deserve grief. But live the new life, too. The beginning is near…

John Robert McFarland

REBRANDING [W, 4-22-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of A Street Corner Philosopher—REBRANDING [W, 4-22-26]

 

We get a good bit of identity from our group loyalties. Reds or Cubs? Coke or Pepsi? Hoosiers or Boilermakers? Bud or Busch? Ford or Chevy? John Deere or International Harvester? You can’t get by generically, saying that you like baseball, or cola, or beer, or cars… You’ve got to choose a brand.

Yes, even tractors. One of my preacher friends tells of going to a county fair where the chair of his church trustees was in charge of the tractor pull. He was a loyal John Deere man, but the guy who was driving the John Deere that day wasn’t as good as the International Harvester driver, so John Deere lost. The church trustee disgustedly said, “Get that piece of green excrement out of here!” [Not the exact words.] My friend said it was the only time he ever heard the usually kind and gentle man use a bad word. His identity was threatened, because his brand lost.

The 20^th century was a time of brand loyalty. Business folks realized they could sell more stuff if they could get people to choose a brand and stick with it. That’s what advertising is all about, and 20^th century advertisers—newspaper, radio, TV, billboards—were masters at it.

Brand loyalty is profit for the business but also peace of mind for the consumer. If Hellmann’s mayonnaise has done your sandwich right, you don’t have to hesitate at the grocery store, wondering if you should consider Miracle Whip. Or, if your Mother always insisted on Hellmann’s, you might use Miracle Whip for other reasons. [I’m not saying how I know this.]

Twentieth century churches were also very much into brand loyalty. You knew what you were getting with the brand…Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Unitarian…

Theology was fading in importance. No one much cared anymore whether they were Arminian or Calvinist or Trinitarian, but the denominational brand was still important for identity, especially if you belonged to an ethnic congregation. Catholics all heard the mass in Latin, but Italian parishes and German parishes were a long way from being the same brand.

Interestingly, the main denominational brand loyalty these days is non-denominational.

I was recently talking to a group of young people. They go to different churches, all with names containing words like Cornerstone and Harvest and Start. Those congregations have no connection with one another, but all of those young people said, proudly, “We go to churches that are non-denominational” as though non-denominational is a denomination. It’s a new brand. And they’re loyal to it.

Branding now is much more local. Non-denominational churches are preferred by many because the name brand of the denomination is no longer meaningful. In fact, to call yourself Methodist or Presbyterian is to identify yourself as “out of it.”

Brand loyalty is still important, but current branding is different. The brands are different and the type of loyalty is different. Churches need to understand that and deal with it

The congregation I belong to is spending a lot of money to “rebrand,” which means creating a web site that will “compel them to come in.” [Luke 14:23] Frankly, I think it’s irrelevant. Yes, you should have a good website, one that communicates clearly, but that goes only so far.

What I do think can go far these days is using social media, like Facebook and Instagram and Tic Toc, to spread the Word and make your brand appealing. Today’s highways and byways are on Facebook and Instagram.

I think I’ll just rebrand myself: I’m NDC—Non-Denominational Curmudgeon. We’re actually a pretty good-sized bunch.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

 

 

IS THE POPE CATHOLIC? [M, 4-20-26

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Mutterings of An Old Man—IS THE POPE CATHOLIC? [M, 4-20-26]

 

It’s an old joke, to identify a “duh” moment: “Is the pope Catholic?” Well, maybe not.

Not long ago, when Helen and I were still able to attend church in person, we unknowingly went to a church the morning they had a traveling Gospel singer. He wasn’t bad, and it was a pretty good service, but as he was introducing his music, he talked about different ways of understanding the Gospel. He used a political analogy. As he pointed, he said, “It’s like if this side of the sanctuary is for Democrats and this other side for Republicans.”

A middle-aged woman a couple of rows ahead of us immediately got up and literally moved to the other side. She muttered, rather loudly, “I just can’t stand the thought of being on that side.”

It was only an example, about something else. The Gospel music was going to sound the same on either side of the sanctuary. But the political identity was so important to her emotionally that she had to get up and move to her side.

Many people in the last few days have said, “Trump has finally gone too far. He’s taken on the Pope. Catholics won’t stand for that.”

Those people don’t understand the current world. Yes, American Catholics respect and honor the Pope. After all, he’s an American, too. but Leo is only the religion pope. Donald Trump is their real pope, the pope who matters. Leo may be American and Catholic, but to American Catholics, Trump is the real Pope.

The word pope is derived from the Greek pappas, meaning father. It started as a designation for any priest, then became a word to describe bishops, and finally only the Bishop of Rome, The Father. Literally, standing in, on earth, for God, the Father, infallible, as God is infallible.

Donald Trump is the Big Daddy for America.

There have been several articles recently about how young men are becoming more religious, meaning attending church more often, which is the most obvious way to measure religiousness. This is especially true of the Roman Catholic church. Young men are attracted to the Catholic Church, we’re told.

I’m not totally convinced. Usually, a “trend” among young people is when the child of a prominent TV personality begins to do something. They assume if their kid is doing it, it must be the current thing.

Even with that caveat, though, I assume that there is some truth to it, and I’m not surprised.

Young men in America are taught that everything is a competition. “Winning isn’t the most important thing; it’s the only thing.” As the coach of my own revered IU football team, Curt Cignetti, says, “You can’t just beat your opponent. You have to break your opponent. Break his will. Make him know he has no chance of winning.”

Young men want to be on the winning side, and right now, the American pope, not the Roman pope, is the winner, the one who is intent not on just beating his opposition but breaking it.

Everything in America is identified by which side you’re on politically. And you’re not allowed to be in the middle. There are now only two people in the US who identify as independent, and since one lives in New Hampshire and the other one in Iowa, those are the bell weather states for seeing how any election will go. 

I think I’ll go listen to some Gospel music. It really does sound the same, regardless of which side you’re on. “Precious Lord, take my hand…”

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

 

CAUGHT BETWEEN [Sat, 4-18-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Personal Reminiscences of An Old Man—CAUGHT BETWEEN [Sat, 4-18-26]

 

I have always felt caught between childhood and adulthood. I did not get to fill out my childhood years, so I’ve always been both child and grown up.

Moving to the farm at Oakland City was the best thing that happened to me. There I learned that I was competent. Not at farm work. Oh, I could do all that was required, even gathering eggs from underneath the hens. I didn’t like farm work, though, especially the egg gathering, because the hens, understandably, did not take kindly to having their eggs stolen and so pecked my hands and arms. We couldn’t afford gloves, so…

No, my competency came in friendship. I learned that I was good at relationships.

But the farm was also one of the worst things that happened to me, because I wasn’t ready to give up childhood and be a man. Even at ten, though, on a hard-scrabble farm, where there is no plumbing, so all water must be pumped and carried in and later carried out, and where the heating requires chopping kindling and carrying coal and ashes in and out, and there are little brothers and sisters to help care for, and weeds to be hoed, and pigs and chickens to be fed, and eggs to be gathered, and berries to be picked…oh, on a 19^th century farm, even though you are half-way through the 20^th century, even at ten, you have to be a man.

I enjoyed it in some ways. I felt useful. But I still wanted to be a kid. And I think I needed to be. I was only ten. I usually say that I was just a kid. But “kid” is an omnibus word. It covers a wide age range, like “college kids.” The truth is that I was just a child.

Suddenly, at ten, I was a farm child. Almost like a hired hand—chores all the time. Had I been a farm child from the beginning, it might have been okay. But I was a city kid. I could walk to school and movies and church. There were no eggs to gather or pigs to feed or gardens to weed or wells to pump water.

Farm life as a hired hand child was lonely. When you live five miles out of town, with no car, you’re isolated. Even in your family, where everyone is working hard just to get the daily work done. “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child…”

I would look at the toys in the Sears catalog and feel so conflicted. I pined for a particular toy gas station shown there. It had doors that rolled up, and a lift for toy cars. I’d never had anything like that. It looked like so much fun.

But while I was yearning for that little gas station, I felt embarrassed and ashamed. The farm, and my parents, required that I be a man at all times. Be a worker. No time for toys or child things

I think that is why I liked sports so much, starting at ten. It was a fun thing, but it wasn’t a child thing. Especially when my bachelor uncle, Johnny Pond, would drive over from Francisco, five miles away, after closing his hardware store for the day, and hit flies to me in the south field, or shoot baskets at the hoop on the side of the barn.

I don’t think I’ve ever resolved that conflict, being caught between childhood and manhood. My transition was too abrupt. I needed more than a day to go from being a city kid to an [unpaid] hired hand.

Maybe that’s why I like children so much. There’s a bit part of me that still wants to be a child, to play with toys, to just have fun and let the grownups worry about getting the work done.

Yes, I know. There are plenty of folks who had shorter and harder childhoods than I did. But I can’t live their lives for them. I could still play with that gas station, though.

John Robert McFarland

THE SPIRITUAL GIFTS OF AGING [R, 4-16-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Preacher—THE SPIRITUAL GIFTS OF AGING [R, 4-16-26]

 

Danny called the other day. I’ve known him since he came to IL State U as a freshman, when I was the campus minister there. That was 60 years ago. You know you’re old when all your former students are retired.

Danny and I have been through a lot together over these 60 years, a special bond in many ways, even though we also have some significant differences. Those differences are important, but not enough to keep us from loving and affirming each other…and enjoying conversations about our past times together.

Also, conversations about our current dilemma as old retired preachers. How do you continue to answer “the call” when your eyes and ears and voice and feet all want to do something else?

Danny says that he is learning to use the spiritual gift of loitering. He just hangs around in spots where it looks like someone might need a hand. It’s the old person’s form of “going to the highways and the byways and compelling them to come in.”

I think he can do that because he’s still a junior in the aging process.

His wife says that the aging process is like being in school…you’re a sophomore and then a junior and finally a senior…until you graduate. Sociologists usually use different designations, like new old and middle old and old old. I think Carol’s classification is better, though. We can all understand it. We’ve all been to school.

In this school of life, when you commence, you don’t get a mortar board and gown. You get shoes and a robe to do some walking. “I got shoes, you got shoes…”

I think I’ll add the freshman year to that taxonomy. Aging usually starts with a somewhat confusing transition. Most of us have an adjustment process when we’re not sure yet if we’re ageing, or how to do it.

In fact, some of us are never sure that we’re aging. All these retired “children,” now in their frosh-senior years of ageing instead of those same years in college, remind me that I still have the same needs and desires I’ve always had—love, friendship, baseball, pie…

Like almost every other old person, I don’t feel like I’m old. Yes, in my body, but not in my spirit. However, seeing all these young people act like they are old, it makes me know that I am old, regardless of how I feel.

I’m not sure that loitering is one of my spiritual gifts as I begin my senior year of aging. It’s a little too active for me. If I stand too long, or start walking too quickly, I’m inclined to fall over. Hmm… maybe that’s my new spiritual gift, falling over. Then folks have the satisfaction of helping me up.

It’s always a spiritual gift to help someone up when they’ve fallen. Also, to let someone help you up when you have fallen.

John Robert McFarland