This thread is so illuminating. I don't know about the rest of you, but I (very mistakenly) picture all of my buddies here on TN as young folks bounding around looking for treasure with the greatest of ease. I purposely stopped aging mentally at 12 years. What a great age. Just enjoying life playing and running all over creation before the teen years hit with jobs, dating, painful breakups, peer pressure, marriage, kids, bills, taxes, health issues, family deaths, and on and on. But I'm 57 now. Hard to get up and down on these old knees. Shoulders hurting. Bones in my wrists and hands aching. I remember working with Daddy on plumbing or running baseboard or whatever and how he'd carry on trying to get up. I was about 20 and thinking (would never say it) "Come on, man. Just spring up!" Or when Mama asked me to open something because the bones in her hands hurt so and I'm thinking "You just got to push through the pain!" What a big old mouthful of words we have to eat, like a toughass, gristly old piece of meat that just wears out the jaws. Sometimes, something so simple as thumbing a page sends what feels like a knife being driven into my hand. Yeah, we just knew it all as young'uns, didn't we? As a worldly inhabitant, I keep pushing, clinging to fleeting youth, so that I can keep looking for coins, bottles, arrowheads and to see my son find something that just lights up his face, but as a Christian, I find myself looking forward to that day when I'm called home, to receive that new body, and to see Mama and Daddy again in theirs as well, and not as I saw them last, drawn up and wasting away. I consider all of you here my extended family, and pray for you as I pray for myself. I realize that I can never meet God's standard, nor can I ever deserve all His blessings. I do feel like I probably deserve the aches and pains, but at the same time, feel like a billionaire to have what good health I have, and to try not to complain, for how could I ever put a price on the two legs, arms, hands and eyes with which I've made a living all these years and that many don't have that much, yet remain cheerful. As a kid, I remember Miss Bessie Martin at church. In a pretty dress, one leg and a wooden crutch, crossing the street to come and sing and worship, and always, all smiles. Miss Bertha Yoder, after spending her entire life looking after others as a nurse, always jolly as anyone could be, wasting away in excruciating pain as her back deterioratied, still smiling. They saw something that I didn't at the time. I apologize for rambling on, not preaching to anybody but maybe myself, to keep on swinging, but at the same time, to always keep my eyes on the only real treasure that I will indeed find one day.
