Tim Stafford's Blog, page 4

The Inside of Aging: Loss–the Body

This is #5 in a series of essays on aging.

Let me not sugarcoat this: aging brings loss. Losses big and small, but continuous and unrelenting. They are not necessarily the focus of our lives as older people, but they are the backdrop of everything. You cannot talk about aging without accounting for loss.

The foundation of all other losses is loss in the body. Bodily incapacities set off others, like a landslide tipped into motion by a single rock.

Loss is always accompanied by denial, and never more acutely than in the case of your body. Think of the common sayings about aging:

You’re only as old as you feel.Age is just a number.

People want to believe that they can overcome aging if they think the right thoughts. Stay cheerful, stay active, remain enthusiastic, join a yoga class and age will never get you.

But it will. Age is more than a number. It’s not a feeling that can be overcome by a good attitude. Your body will gradually (or suddenly) lose its capacity. Your balance will become poor. You won’t be able to run anything like fast. Your skin will grow less plastic and more vulnerable to wounds. Lung capacity will diminish. So will strength. There is a very good chance that you will experience disabling hearing loss. (About half of adults over 75 do.)

Some people’s bodies show the effects of aging sooner and more dramatically than others. Sickness plays a big part. So do diet and exercise. Undoubtedly your genes are influential. Nobody can predict the speed of bodily decay individually; all we can say for sure is that it will happen. The tide is going out. You can’t stop it.

I happen to be a very healthy person, and I run every day to stay fit. I don’t feel like an old man. However, I run the same 4-mile route repeatedly, and I time myself. Year by year I get slower. Some years back I was kvetching about this to my doctor, who is also a runner. “Why don’t you turn off your watch?” he asked me.

So, no sympathy from him. I saw his point but I’m not quite ready to turn off my watch. I want to see how fast I go, even if it’s a picture of predictable deterioration. My son, who ran the route in high school, asked me my time. He was appalled when I told him. “Dad,” he asked, “can’t you try harder?”

As a backpacker I used to carry a heavy pack at high altitudes for ten miles a day. Now I am finished at about six or seven miles. I used to cross streams on logs without slowing down; now I’m a tipsy danger to myself. I’m objectively aging. My body is gradually losing its capacity.

What’s weird is that I don’t feel any different. I observe the changes, but they seem to be taking place without my involvement. It’s like I am watching somebody else’s loss.

I notice this with older people who fall—say, at night, on their way to the bathroom. Oftentimes they fall multiple times before they are willing to use a walker to get around. “That can’t be me falling down,” they seem to say. “That was just a one-time, incomprehensible and unpredictable accident.”

Somehow, though, we know. We show our awareness by how cautious we become. I’m very careful when I’m going down stairs or descending a steep slope. My caution began ten years ago after I fell off my bike and hurt myself badly. I’m not conscious of worrying about such a fall, but I realize I hardly ever ride my bike anymore. In my younger years, I never thought about falling. I did fall, of course, especially as a child, all the time. The knees of my trousers were constantly being repaired. However, it meant very little to me. I picked myself up and went on. That’s very different now. I am aware of my vulnerability.

My aging body continues to surprise me. I hardly can believe that it’s me who has grown so old. And this loss is the foundation of many other losses.

The Inside of Aging: Brothers and Sisters and Parents

This is #4 in a series of short essays on aging.

The world of the old is introspective. Memories take up more mind space. So do regrets, very often.

Self-reflection is a natural response to recognizing that we are near the shoreline. We have lived a lot of years and may not have many left. Our chances for change are limited—we lack the strength and the boundless future to reinvent ourselves. So we contemplate what we are. We ponder our families of origin, our siblings and our parents. After all, that’s where we were made.

As younger people we took our families for granted. We focused mainly on ourselves, our dreams and our anxieties. Our parents seemed as unalterable as El Capitan. We reacted to them much as we reacted to the weather: they just were.

That awareness has shifted as we grow older. We still focus on ourselves, but now we can’t help seeing how much our upbringing made us who we are. We reminisce about the past and ponder its meaning. The perspective of a long life draws us toward our family because our family is where we became ourselves.

Our relationship to siblings changes, often for the better. When we were young, our relationships to brothers and sisters could be anywhere on the map: as close as a second self, or as distant as the man on the moon. This huge variability closes as we get older. Whether siblings have been distant obstacles or closest friends, they usually grow more significant to us as we age.

That’s certainly true for me. For many years my siblings and I drifted along, mostly at a distance. Friends mattered more to me. In the last ten years or so I’ve grown closer to family members. I realize how much they matter to me.

Our brothers and sisters are the only people in the world who know our parents as we do. They not only remember our childhood home, they can draw a map of it. Your childhood school? The church your family attended? The family’s favorite restaurant? Stories of how your family bought the Christmas tree? Siblings know all that. (They may remember it differently, but that only emphasizes your kinship. Nobody else knows or cares.)

All this commonality might make it seem easy to be close. Not necessarily. Decades of living in different places with different spouses and different careers have pointed you in different directions. Some sisters are as close as, well, sisters, but others have had little to do with each other as adults. It takes time and patience to find your way back to each other. Hurts that haven’t healed and disputes that were never settled are not easily resolved. To become truly close, not just occupying the same space at family gatherings, you must work through the torments of the past.

In my own family of origin, and in my wife’s, the path toward siblings has been up and down and in and out. It has taken years, and it’s ongoing. When I look back, though, the trend is clear: we have (all of us) sought to come closer together. Not perfectly, certainly, but—when I think of the contrast, the before-and-after—definitely. We have reached out. We have gathered together. We have made time to meet, remember each other’s birthdays, celebrate important days. With our parents gone, we lost a built-in reason for communicating and gathering. We had to make a choice: will we put in the effort to befriend these people who know us so well but also don’t know us at all? I don’t think we ever talked through that decision, but we made it, nonetheless. We would put in the effort.

As a result we are much more comfortable together. Not perfectly. Nothing in life is perfect. But better enough for us to share memories and sharpen our understanding of how our parents and grandparents and community and church shaped us.

In drawing closer to our siblings, we are reaching down into our roots. Knowing them, we inevitably know ourselves better. Siblings can access our source code better than anybody.

**

With parents it is the same, yet entirely different. Like our siblings they know us very well, but from another angle entirely. They were never our peers. Often it’s difficult for them to treat us like adults, because their memories are loaded with diapers and tears and, later, teenage irresponsibility.

We have the same problem, only looking up, not down. We get stuck in childhood too. Our parents were once like mountains to us: huge, immovable. We couldn’t imagine that they had feelings and failures. Our adult selves have a hard time forgiving them for their imperfections.

Parents who abandon the family, who are drunks, who are addicts, who (God forbid) sexually assault their children, or physically and verbally abuse them—their children may never get beyond what happened when they were young. They may not want to. They suffered such a primal wound.

Most of us, though, resent parents over faults that seem far less incendiary. They failed us emotionally. They didn’t believe in us. They weren’t available when we needed them. They were so strict. They made us feel guilty. These may not sound like terrible crimes to other people, but in a parent-child relationship everything is magnified. Just as siblings have issues to resolve, so do parents and children. To work patiently at that is a sign of maturity, which we should aspire to as we grow older.

The greatest issue with parents, however, is one we can’t get over: parents leave us. Our parents die. They may be mentally vacant, a shadow of the persons we grew up with. They will not contribute much to our self-understanding under such conditions.

This is a wound of a different kind. Old hurts will not be resolved. Memories of the past will not be shared. Our parents’ absence leaves a void in our lives.

My wife Popie and I both lost our parents decades ago. We miss them. We feel empty space where their love and support used to be. They have answers to family questions that I never thought to ask when I was younger. Now nobody can answer me.

It’s helped me that my sister Elizabeth collected and catalogued letters preserved from my parents’ younger days—when they were in college, when they met and fell in love, when they were newly married. I’ve spent some happy hours reading through the binders of letters. It answered some of my questions about family history, and it gave me a window into my parents’ lives before I was born. I’m grateful, but it’s no substitute for their flesh-and-blood presence.

We should bend every effort to go deeper with our parents, to extend love and forgiveness to them while we have them. They make up a part of who we are. We carry their genes. We have gestures and habits and sayings that we unconsciously inherited from them. They produced us, and if we seek self-understanding in our later years, they are the best source. It’s not necessarily easy—remember those emotional scars—but it is worthwhile, always. This, I believe, is a primary task as you near the shoreline: get to know your parents if you still can.

The Inside of Aging: Children and grandchildren

This is #3 in a series of short essays on aging.

Near the shoreline, you discover a subtly different life. Not only are you more aware of limits. A new set of characters appears. Old friends are still your old friends, but other people emerge to become, frankly, more important to you.

I have three grown children, all in their late thirties or early forties. They all have children, so I have seven grandchildren, ages 1 to 8. I love them far more deeply, far more viscerally, than my friends.

And they love me, I’m very sure. But not in the same way.

Relationships with children are asymmetrical. As parents, we think about them constantly. Our children do not think so much about us. They are far too concerned with their own lives. Jobs, education, child-rearing, entertainment, recreation, friendships—these all matter tremendously. Their parents aren’t a primary focus, nor do we want to be. I want my children to live large and thrive, and by that I don’t mean constantly doting on their parents. They’ll never think that their relationship with me is the primary meaning of their lives. They shouldn’t. It’s true, however, that they become more and more the meaning of my life, as I grow older.

Grandchildren? Multiply those feelings by three. When we had babies of our own, we were swamped by the stress and exhaustion of parenting. Now we have time to delight in our grandchildren. And we do. The love we feel can be almost overwhelming.

The grandchildren usually delight in their grandparents as well. However, when they reach fourth grade or so they generally begin to lose interest. They no longer want to sit in anyone’s lap. They don’t need you to read stories to them. You are no longer a very interesting playmate. They may adore their grandparents, but they have no insight whatsoever into what makes them tick. And are they curious? Not very much. Instead of growing more aware of us as they grow older, usually they find us less interesting. The four-year-old who ran into our arms may not, at fourteen, come out of his bedroom to say hello.

How do I know? I remember. I recall the stupefying boredom of listening to grandparent conversations around the dining table. I remember overhearing an adult conversation about rose bushes and wondering to myself, What are they talking about? Not until you get older do you begin to think of your parents and grandparents as interesting human beings. Not until you are much older do you care how Aunt Jane ended up in Kansas City.

I used to listen to my mom talk endlessly about cousins and uncle and aunts. She had a way of diving into her pile of memories without explaining who they were or why they mattered. Or if she did explain, I wasn’t listening. I wasn’t interested in all these names of people I never knew, many of them dead. To my mother, they were very much alive.

Now that I’m old, I wish I had listened more carefully. That’s my family she was telling me about. Listening was, at the least, a chance to know and love my mom more deeply.

If grandparents are wise, they back off when the lack of reciprocity kicks in. But not all grandparents are wise. Sometimes they make attempts at intimacy that aren’t welcome. Sometimes they try to buy love with expensive presents and promises of trips. It’s not wrong to lavish gifts on your grandchildren. But even little children sense when it’s ultimately manipulative. If every present has a hidden quid quo pro, the relationship will sour, sooner or later. You really don’t want to feel that you have to keep giving bigger and better presents or your grandchildren won’t care for you. That is the opposite of the love you long for, which is free and spontaneous.

I’ve seen parents pressure children to prioritize family over friends, jobs, interests. They say the family always comes first. Such parents may nag at their adult children, wishing for returns on their almost helpless love. Sooner or later, the children get sick of it. They have their own lives to live.

As parents age and lose so much of what has made up their lives (work, travel, activities, friends), it can seem reasonable to them that their children should call every day, eat every Sunday dinner at their home, listen carefully to their sage counsel and eagerly share their innermost thoughts. To the children, this often seems suffocating. They may comply but not happily. Disappointed parents squeeze harder, longing for more and better contact.

The mismatch is so common comedians can count on people laughing at it, usually at the expense of an overbearing mother. Think of the many, many Jewish mother jokes. It’s not all that funny, though, when parents are lonely and adrift, longing for reassurance that their children care about them.

We, the parents, have the experience and wisdom to understand this situation and correct our behavior. We can find the correct balance: giving our kids space to live their own lives, but also reminding them that there are tremendous benefits to honoring your parents. A good balance has to start with our ability to back off, curb our emotions, and allow our children space to find for themselves how much they love their parents. They will, sooner or later, if we have loved them well.

The children’s lives exist independently of their parents (and certainly their grandparents). It’s not so true of the parents. Our lives are deeply invested in our children’s, and their success and failure, their joy or grief, their hopes and fears, become ours.

I doubt anything defines our well-being in old age more than this. The imperative of loving and being loved in our family lies deep in our souls. It only grows as other parts of our world shrink. Our children and grandchildren become the most important influences in our lives.

As older people we must learn from God. His relationship is asymmetrical with all his created beings. He loves us infinitely; we respond inadequately. And does he nag us with demands? He gives us space. He finds the balance between letting us choose for ourselves and urging us to approach him with love and adoration.

God is our role model. We should act with the freedom and pleasure of God in his creation. Like God we should offer ourselves lovingly and graciously. But like God we should not try too hard. We should leave our loved ones in freedom. Thus when they choose to love in return, it will be wholehearted and unconstrained.

It’s a strange paradox: We must love with all our hearts yet let our love go free. When friends and co-workers held first place in our affections, there was no such thing as “too much.” This new crowd sneaks into our hearts, however, requiring a large dose of freedom.

That is life near the coastline. We don’t know where we’ll meet our limit, we only know that it is not too far off. And with our loved ones, we love knowing that we must say good-bye. These loves are not forever. Our children and grandchildren will carry on without us, when we are just a memory.

The Inside of Aging: The Shoreline

This is #2 in a series of short essays on aging.

I think I was in my fifties when I became aware of a shoreline. It was over the horizon, out of sight. The realization of its existence came unexpectedly, revealing itself so gradually, so undramatically that I hardly knew that something new had entered my life. I could smell the sea, but nothing in my line of sight betrayed it. I saw no cliffs, heard no breakers. Nevertheless, I knew the shoreline was there even if I couldn’t see exactly where. I was coming to a limit, a place where I could go no farther.

Until then, my future was endless. It was a direction, an arrow pointed forward. In my work, for example: I would become a writer, the best writer I could be, and one article would lead to another. One book would lead to another. And so on, endlessly. As there was no limit to the valuable and interesting subjects to write on, there could be no limit on my career.

Or travel. My work took me to exotic places, meeting and interviewing people very different from myself, seeing new sights, learning. The list of countries worthy of a journalistic examination was long. New issues arose constantly in India, Argentina, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Viet Nam. I wanted to visit them all, and then some. I thought my travels would never end. Or, more accurately, I didn’t think. I assumed the world would always be there, and so would I.

And that was just for work! Travel for pleasure, with my wife, with friends, to Italy or England or Utah could continue forever. Gardening would go on forever. Baseball.

Then one day I realized I didn’t have time to see it all or do it all.

Somebody called me up and asked me to help him write a book. I would be paid well, the subject was interesting, and the man asking for help seemed like a nice guy. All systems go! I’m a professional writer! If somebody offers money to write, I generally say yes! The only problem was that I had another book in mind, one of my own. It would have to wait if I worked on this project. But no problem, right? My book wasn’t really urgent. I could put it off for a year.

Now, though, the thought came to me that at my age this might be my last or next-to-last book. That idea had never, ever occurred to me.

 I needed to ponder seriously whether, with limited time, somebody else’s project might prevent me from doing my own work, which I cared about deeply. I needed to prioritize. I needed to focus my energies, so that (if this was my last published work) it would be worthy.

I’d realized I’m not going to write forever.

The sense of a shoreline goes beyond projects and places. It’s a vision of a future that isn’t endless.

I’m 73 years old. It’s reasonable to hope I’ll live to 93. That’s 20 years. Twenty is a very finite number. I can count to 20 on my fingers and toes. One year, I’m down to 19. Another year, 18.

I can see already, it’s going to move fast. That doesn’t make me fearful. I have no sense of panic. No, but it concentrates my mind.

I just came back from a backpacking trip with my two grown sons. I’m grateful I can still backpack.  My sons asked me what I was writing. I told them about this project, mentioning the idea of a shoreline. They were interested, but also amused. The rest of the trip they ribbed me about my imminent end. And yes, it is funny. I don’t want to take myself too seriously.

Nevertheless, it is sobering to know there is a limit, and that it’s not too far off.

When I was young, the vast expanse of time gave me freedom. I could try things. My mistakes could be overcome. Time wasted was of no account. Now, I have a tighter focus on the choices before me.

I relate this to the somber words of Psalm 90: “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” You number what is precious and limited. You don’t count the coffee beans in a bin or the needles on a pine tree. What would be the point? You count the days until Christmas, or the pennies you need to afford an ice cream cone. Numbering helps you keep track of every last one. That is true of days. Each one deserves our best attention. Each one deserves to be numbered.

You can’t say exactly when you will reach the shore, only that it exists and that it’s not too far off. Knowing that makes you pay attention to where you are. It makes every day precious. That is part of the inside of aging. Paradoxically, life seems short and more precious.

The Inside of Aging: Introduction

Years ago I wrote a book called As Our Years Increase. It considered the challenges faced at various stages of old age, with an emphasis on how families can work together.

Over the years I’ve had many people ask me whether I would update that book or write another one on the same topic. I never felt that I should. I’d said all I had to say, most of which stood up adequately when it came to actually living by my advice. My wife Popie and I went through the aches of aging with our parents. My father-in-law died of a heart attack, my mother died rather suddenly of lung cancer, my father took years to fade away with Alzheimer’s, and my mother-in-law died of I don’t know what—her body just wore out. Only one of the four, my father, died under institutional care, though my mother-in-law spent most of her last years receiving 24/7 care from teams of caregivers in her own home, such that my brother-in-law, who oversaw the finances, proclaimed that we were running a full-service nursing home with one resident. Three of our parents died under hospice care, which was a great help.

In other words, subsequent to publishing a book about caring for family members through their old age, I got to experience it. Overall, it went well. We had our moments of trauma and stress, but we made it through with love intact.

Yet while going through all that I learned almost nothing about how it feels to get old. I witnessed it from the outside.

I recall only two moments when I got a momentary glimpse of the view from inside old age. Once my father-in-law was remembering his childhood. Listening to him, I thought I heard a clarity and intensity that was new to me. (He was a practical man, not given to fits of philosophy.) Oh, yes, he said when I asked. Memories were flooding into him, so vivid he could almost touch them.

The other moment was with my dad. He told me, as though surprised, that he now thought his greatest accomplishment had been raising “you kids.” I have two sisters and a brother. My father’s love was never in doubt to us, but his focus was. He loved to read and think and preach sermons. He was a good dad, but I don’t think he woke up in the morning with his children on his mind. In his old age, to his surprise, his sense of what mattered had shifted.

I am 73 as I write, and witnessing old age from the inside. I realize that 80-year-olds and 90-year-olds will think I am just a novice. They are surely right. Already, though, I am in a different world.

In this account I’m not aiming to offer practical help. I won’t tell you how to pick a nursing home or how to write your will. It’s more about what I’m discovering for myself in this new world. Things look familiar, but when I get close and experience them, I find they offer a very different, quite unanticipated view of the universe.

Nobody ever told me to expect this. I thought old age was just life with more challenges. It is that, but it’s almost a different life. I seek to make public this different world, this new mindset, which requires so many adjustments and brings so many surprises.

The subject may appear to be a downer. Much of the inside of aging involves loss and disappointment, to which nobody looks forward. Yet I honestly can say I don’t find it depressing. I see it as new ground, unmapped, full of surprises and challenges. Is Robinson Crusoe’s story a downer? He lost everything and had to apply all his resources to surviving each day. Yet his story is a classic that still inspires.

I am Robinson Crusoe, cast on an island I do not know.

All of us know that we will get old. We see aging all around us, in our families, in our churches, while shopping and at our entertainments. People get old; we will too. Yet the reality comes as a surprise, no matter how well prepared we think we are. These essays attempt to map new territory, to give the lay of the land.

This is the first of a series, which I will try to publish more or less daily.

New Clothes

I got to preach in my home church on Sunday. My text was Galatians 3:26-29, a wonderful jewel-box of declarations about our identity in Christ. Our epidemic of loneliness, isolation and despair is at the heart of our current angry polarization, I think. I spoke about how Galatians’ good news provides us with new clothes–the clothing of Christ–to meet the world.

The service can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gATsSTVoHM, with my sermon starting at 27:53.

My Dad in the Haze of Alzheimer’s

These days, preachers don’t get a pass. We have seen too many religious leaders turn out creepy, covering up their own crimes and others’. What lies behind preachers’ charm and their attractive speech? We wonder.

I’ve been thinking about my dad, a Presbyterian minister all his adult life. “Presbyterian” suggests smooth, deep-voiced pronouncements, but my dad was a different sort: excitable, emotional, intense. He loved preaching. He was a heart-and-soul evangelical in a day when that meant commitment to the Bible and to personal transformation, not political affiliation.

I never doubted for a moment that he was utterly genuine. I don’t believe, and never did, that he had a secret side. He died in 2006, seventeen years ago, after a long bout with Alzheimer’s.  Those years were not easy for him or for those who loved him. I’ve been remembering, however, two aspects that revealed my dad’s heart.

You’ve probably heard of people who turn mean in dementia, losing the filters that helped them keep their true feelings under cover. Some begin to swear a blue streak, others tell dirty jokes, some have anger outbursts. I know of several charming socialites whose helpers quit, one after another, because they were so mistreated. When inhibitions are lost and the true person comes out, it can be an awful thing.

My dad was an intellect, who read theology for fun. He had an incisive mind and a steel-trap memory. All that was lost, however, when he developed Alzheimer’s. He couldn’t follow an argument anymore. I don’t think he knew what an argument was. Serendipitously, his questing mind stumbled on a series of devotional books. They made deeply sincere appeals to the heart. My dad wouldn’t have found them to be of any interest before the disease. Not intellectually stimulating, he would have thought. Now he became obsessed with reading them. He found them enthralling and deeply moving. I looked through one once, curious to see what had captured his heart. The prose seemed exquisitely ordinary, making earnest calls to come closer to Jesus. My dad had underlined every single word in the entire book. When his intellect was gone, his heart belonged passionately to Jesus. With his filters gone, he loved more than ever. He believed what he had preached.

My dad liked to walk in the mall. He always enjoyed greeting little children, even though I think he made some of their mothers nervous with his friendliness. With Alzheimer’s he developed a regular habit—or ministry, as he considered it—of greeting the workers who manned the kiosks on the main floor, selling jewelry or food or trinkets. He came to know them all, making a daily circuit to greet them. It cheered him tremendously that they were friendly to him. Sometimes he would give away a Bible if someone wanted one. Mainly, though, he acted as a friendly passer-by. I walked with him a few times and he was eager to introduce me to his friends. At the time I was bemused. In retrospect I see it as a lovely revelation of his true character. He was just as proud to know these unknown, unseen, underpaid workers as he had been to know the well-dressed, well-fed members of his churches.

I deeply regret that my dad didn’t get to finish his life with his mental faculties intact. Alzheimer’s brought many severe challenges, such as paranoia (for a time he thought that TV villains were real and that murderers had invaded his home). I want to note, however, that without Alzheimer’s I might never have known that Jesus had touched him so deeply, core deep, in loving God and loving his neighbor. He really was what he professed to be.

Your Birthright

I preached again on Sunday, this time on Genesis 25:19-34. It’s the story of the birth of Jacob and Esau, twins, and the first incident that set them against each other. The tragic outcome is that “Esau despised his birthright.” (v. 34) We are warned not to follow his footsteps.

The video stream can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFauw9PF9QI. The sermon begins at 14:15

The End of the Beginning

I want to alert you to my latest book, a novel called The End of the Beginning. I’ve worked on it over three or four years, and it’s the most carefully crafted book I have written. I think it’s important.

The back cover blurb puts it this way: This is a novel of American evangelical Christianity at the end of the 20th century. It begins with faith-filled idealism and ends fractured by forces it has never dreamed of. The believers are humbled by what they discover in the world around them and in themselves.

In other words, it’s a commentary on our times.

Mainly, though, it’s a story.

It begins with a group of kids, eighteen or nineteen years old, working the summer at a Christian camp in the mountains above Santa Cruz. Something magical happened. They became deepest friends. They fell in love. Drawn together by their faith, they felt their lives being transformed and lifted up. It was the best summer they had ever dreamed of: Sam and Howard, Julie and Mindy and—most of all—Verity.

Verity was plain and woebegone, intimidated by her smooth and confident peers. Yet somehow she became deeply loved, their spiritual center.

Then summer ended and real life began. The End of the Beginning tells of the disappointments, the unexpected difficulties and the stunning betrayals that followed that magical season.

You can order The End of the Beginning on Amazon as a paperback or a Kindle book. I hope you will buy at least two and tell all your friends to do the same. Click here and go straight to the site.

Idols All Around

Sunday (7/9/23) I preached at Healdsburg Community Church on Genesis 24. That’s the story of Abraham sending his servant to get a wife for his (40-year-old) son Isaac. The question I focused on is: How do you live a life of faith while you’re surrounded by people who worship other gods? Abraham was very aware of this dilemma, as few other men in Israel’s history were.

A recording of the service is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5RmSakiuRA. The sermon begins at minute 30.