A New Man

Michaelmas II

…and your youth is renewed like an eagle’s.

— Psalm 103

When I was young, my extended family spent several days camping together in Arkansas. It was fairly primitive camping, and after a while someone arrived with a contraption that could be connected to our water supply and turned into a makeshift warm shower. My grandfather was among the first to try it. Later, sitting around the campsite and talking enthusiastically about this marvelous invention, Grandpa announced, “I feel like a new man!”

Of course, he wasn't a new man. He wasn't any younger than he had been before the shower. But something had been restored. He was clean, refreshed and invigorated. Perhaps that helps me understand the Psalmist's wonderful promise that God “satisfies you with good things, and your youth is renewed like an eagle's.” The promise isn't that our youth will be preserved forever. Later in the same Psalm, our lives are compared to grass. Time passes. We age. Things end. Yet somehow, within a life that continues moving forward, there can still be renewal.

In my twenties, I spent summers working and camping at Christian family camps. Like many campers, I wished sometimes that camp could last all year. I have felt something similar on Christmas Day: Why can't it be Christmas all year long? Then one ordinary Sunday, on my way to church, it occurred to me that perhaps this is how we do it. We don't remain at camp forever, and Christmas eventually gets packed back into boxes. Instead, we keep showing up. We worship. We sing. We serve somebody. We sit beside other people. We give something and receive something. Then, another week, we show up again.

Yesterday morning I did that once more, on what may be my last Sunday for quite a while with a church and choir I have come to love. There was some melancholy in that. Renewal does not mean preventing things from ending. It doesn't mean pretending that we're still twenty-five, or keeping every beloved season going indefinitely. Sometimes renewal means receiving what today still has to give us, even as we allow yesterday to become yesterday.

Perhaps there is an important difference between staying young and having our youth renewed. I cannot make myself young again, nor would I want to spend the rest of my life trying. But I can continue showing up for the things that awaken gratitude, curiosity, service, worship, friendship and joy. Grandpa stepped out of that makeshift shower exactly the same age he had been when he stepped into it. Yet something was new. Maybe that is one of God's quieter gifts as the years accumulate: not returning us to our youth, but continuing to renew the life within us.

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