RELEVANCE & IRRELEVANCE 12-8-16

On Facebook, one of Helen’s friends was giving her friends a questionnaire about their bucket list, or something like that. One question was about zip lining.

Helen thought about it for quite a while, ran through a mental list of all her coats, and concluded that the answer was “Yes.” But she began to wonder. The other questions had to do with piercings and tattoos and belly dancing. Oh, zip lining wasn’t about whether she’d ever had a coat with a zip-out lining, after all.

Old people live in a different world. It no longer exists. Nobody cares what we think or do. We are irrelevant, and that’s okay.

A tottering old man in one of my churches, I’ll call him Hank, then the age I am now, used to complain bitterly, and divisively, about how the younger people in the church did not respect him since they did not ask his advice. They did not disrespect him. They just didn’t notice him. He was irrelevant. Unfortunately, Hank did not understand that it was okay to be irrelevant.

There is a time to be relevant and a time to be irrelevant. The surest way to be irrelevant tomorrow is to be too relevant today. Hank thought relevance was his reason for existence.

Relevance and irrelevance are relative. Relevant or irrelevant, you are a child of God. Neither relevance nor irrelevance separates us from the love of God.

Nobody cares about what I think or do. I’m old. I’m irrelevant. That’s okay, because I’m a child of God.

How will people learn that it is okay to be irrelevant unless old people show them by living irrelevantly? Oh, I guess that makes us relevant, doesn't it?

JRMcF