We Call Ourselves Disciples begins with “The Disciples and the Bible,” because the Bible is foundational for Disciples. Ron Allen explains the history of interpretation and the diversity in the DOC. He acknowledges that there is agency in interpretation and a need for humility as he calls for readers to reengage the Bible.

“Diversity” Describes many aspects of Disciples life, including our relationships with the Bible in both past and present. Although all Disciples recognize the Bible as an authority for the church, there is no single Disciples approach to the Bible. Disciples have different perspectives on the nature of the Bible itself, on how to interpret it, and on how the church relates the Bible to other sources of authority.

In the first generation of Disciples (roughly 1804 through the Civil War), many people believed the leading ideas in the Bible contained divine revelation. Many followed Alexander Campbell in seeing the biblical material divided into three periods: (1) the ancestors in Genesis; (2) from Moses to the day of Pentecost; and (3) the Christian era beginning on the day of Pentecost and continuing into the present. Few disciples today continue this way of thinking.

To early Disciples the most authoritative parts of the Bible were the writings that came after Pentecost. Campbell saw these materials as a constitution for the church, revealing its identity and instructing its worship, governance, and mission. The writings before Pentecost, including the Gospels, had less authority. Contemporary Disciples usually regard the whole Bible as having authoritative qualities, with some Disciples prioritizing the gospels.

Alexander Campbell thought the church should interpret the Bible by taking account of the historical context, authorship, literary devices, and the intentions of the document. It was particularly important for interpreters to “come within the understanding distance” - that is, readers should interpret the Bible from the standpoint of being existentially aware of God’s unrelenting love and God’s larger purposes. Interpretation should take place in community to benefit from the insights of the different participants.

For many people, the understanding distance included the notion of postmillennialism, the idea that the mission of the church includes preparing the world for the return of Christ by engaging in social reform designed to reshape the social world in love, peace, and prosperity. Only after this effort would Christ return to rule. The church, then, reads the Bible for guidance in how to prepare the church and the world for the final return of Christ. Although few Disciples today subscribe to postmillennialism, there is a thematic similarity between the focus on social reform in postmillennialism and the concern for justice permeating current Disciples life.

1. Do you believe the Bible contains divine revelation?
2. What portion of the Bible do you think is the most relevant for you?
3. Do you consider the historical context, authorship, literary devices, and intentions of the document when you are reading and studying the Bible?
4. Do you think postmillennialism and social justice are thematic? 

Journal or discuss your thoughts regarding this lesson and then come back to it later to see if your thoughts have changed.

Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “The young know the rules. The old know the exceptions.” We learn as the years go by that life is nothing but a series of exceptions to be reckoned with, to be mediated, to be understood. Our standards are only that – standards. They are not absolutes, and those who seek to make them so soon fall in the face of their own rigidities. We not only know that no one is perfect, we know that no one can be.

We know these things now with the kind of knowledge that can only come from knowing ourselves, from the awareness of our own failings, our own mistakes, our great desire to be perfect and, whatever our efforts at anything, our own cavernous need for mercy. The problem is that once we know something, we can never not know it. It requires a new kind of honesty from us. It burdens us with its truth.

Age is a veritable mineshaft of hard-won truths. Marriage is not a matter of always and only “living happily ever after,” we discover. Youth is not “carefree,” not matter how says so. Governments are not unfailingly worth our “allegiance,” and religions, too, “sin,” we learn. But maybe more compelling than any other is the awareness that having been failed against, we too have failed. We not only have much to forgive, we have much to be forgiven for – if not by others, at least by ourselves.

It is often not so much what we have done or what has been done to us, but what we have done because of it that is the greater grief. Family feuds go on for generations, for instance, far beyond the time when anybody remembers, if they ever knew, exactly how the rift started or why. Worse still are the friendships that collapse and the time that is lost between us because, unlike family, there are no natural meeting points to bring people back together again.

Only forgiveness can stem such pain in us. An apology alone can’t possibly do it. This kind of pain that has been fed by time, can be healed only by the wounded because it is the wounded who is maintaining it. The hardness is in our hearts now.  We own it, foster it, and are suffering from it more than the person we hold responsible for the hurt. The question is, why does such an old sore hurt more now that we are old than it did when it happened? Or, conversely, why are we more sensitive to it now than we have been for years? And the answer is “because.”

Because we are: older now, feeling time now, seeing youthful foolishness now, realizing the distance this has put between ourselves and people we loved has been much more damaging to our souls than the original offense could ever have been, and because it is time to value exception more than recrimination. Only forgiveness is the therapy of old age that wipes the slate clean, that heals as it embraces. Forgiveness is more important to the one who forgives than it is to the one forgiven.

Bitterness skews our balance for years to come. Only we can free ourselves from the burden of bitterness old anger brings with it still. Hasn’t too much time been wasted on this little bit of nothingness already? Is this the kind of thing we want to have continue to weigh us down as we spend the last of our days, the best of our days? Forgiveness puts life back together again. We are who we are – and so is everyone else. It is forgiveness of others that gains for us the right to forgive ourselves for being less than we always wanted to be.

Sister Joan says: A burden of these years is that we run the risk of allowing ourselves to be choked by the struggles of the past. A blessing of these years is the ability to see that life does not have to be perfect to be perfect; it only needs to be forgiving - and forgiven.

1. “Forgiveness is more important to the one who forgives than it is to the one who is forgiven.” Reflect on this and then discuss or journal your thoughts.
2. What are some festering grudges that need forgiveness to free yourself from the burden of holding on to them? Can you write a note to or call the offender? Can you forgive yourself? Journal or discuss your thoughts.

“What is the worst of woes that wait on age?” Lord Byron wrote. “What stamps the wrinkle on the brow? To view each loved one blotted from life’s page and be alone on earth as I am now.” A major characteristic of aging is that it separates us from the rest of humanity. The older we get, the younger the rest of the world appears to us, the more aware we are that we now inhabit a very rare space. There are fewer now who understand who we are, where we’ve been, what we care about in life.

Age is the elegy of elegies. It has a greater impact than death in many ways. In death you are remembered. In age, you are far more likely to feel forgotten sequestered even from the very act of living. We are the ones who have to ask ourselves every day, “How does it feel to live in a younger world while being so old?” There is a loneliness that seeps in as we age. It is the loneliness that distances ourselves from where we’ve come from and to where we’re going. We begin to be less and less here and more and more … where?

On the one hand, we are lonely, even in a crowd, because there are so few we can talk to about this new moment in our lives. And on the other hand, it does not feel real, even to us. Age, we know, is nothing but a number. Except that it isn’t. We begin to be aware that life is slipping between our fingers like the oil of fine olives, smoothly and steadily, smoothly and regularly, smoothly but inevitably.
That’s when we get lonely, not because we are being isolated or ignored, but precisely because we are now in the fullness of life. Our own. We are not living the life of the masses anymore. And our life, we have come to understand, is very different from theirs.

We miss the sense of importance that came with the bustle of middle age. We miss the daily social stimulation that came with going into the office, the shop, the store, the classroom, the hospital, and being a part of the team, the crowd, the birthday parties, the neighborhood barbecues. We miss the intellectual stimulation, sense of achievement, of being needed, that came with the daily problems. That is, until we become conscious of the new importance that comes with simply being who we are, rather than simply what we did, who we were around but did not really know, and being a part of the accomplishments that no one ever heard about. We miss having a place to fill.

Families used to stay together through generations and actual retirement was not as common. There was no T.V. or internet to keep older people informed back then. There was no way to become part of something even bigger and more important than the work they did, once the work was over. Now there are far-flung families and friends, jobs change often, and early retirement is a choice frequently made. T.V. and the internet have made people able to be close across distances and more easily able to find societal needs worth doing regardless of the pay. Then we discover that if we’re lonely, it may be because we have not looked around to see who needs us.

A person who is needed – really needed – is never lonely, never isolated, never without purpose in life. All we need to do is to go out and do something. The world is waiting for us with open arms.

Sister Joan says: A burden of these years is that we will hole up somewhere and mourn our age, our change in life, our losses. A blessing of these years is that we will make ourselves available to the world that is waiting for us, even now, even here.

1. “Age is the elegy of elegies,” Sister Joan states. Look up the definition of “elegy.” After doing so, discuss or journal why you think she made the statement.
2. What has been your experience of loneliness? Was Sister Joan’s solution to look around and see who needs you an idea that might help you deal with loneliness? Discuss or journal your thoughts.

If, as the years go by, we grow more and more aware of both the meaning and the meaninglessness of things, we must certainly also grow more sensitive, not less aware of the ebb and flow of life. In her journal, The Measure of My Days, which she kept in her eighties, Florida Scott-Maxwell wrote, “Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age.” We do not simply ignore life as we get older, but we do engage with it at a different level, out of different motives, with a more focused heart.

This time of life is not meant to solidify us in our inadequacies. It is meant to free us to mature even more. It is more than possible that we will go to our graves with a great deal of personal concerns, of life, agendas, left unresolved. To hope that in the end all ruptures will have been repaired, however, is at best unreal. People are long gone and even longer out of touch. We can’t put back together failed marriages, cancel years of neglect, a lifetime of indifference or a history of disregard for the people who had a right to expect our concern. That time, those situations are simply gone.

Inside, the scars still smart though. We have been hurt. We have done the hurting. Mistakes were made. If we cannot deal directly with all the unfinished struggles of our lives, how can we possibly face the end of life with any kind of serenity? The fact is that the unrest that accumulates over the years is the very grace reserved for the end time, the last years, the pinnacle of life.

Now we must deal with our consciousness of these wrongs and let them make a productive difference in us. Why? There is no one here to forgive us anymore, no one to tell us we were right, no one to surrender to our insistence no one left for us to refuse to consort with. In our deepest parts we must come to peace with ourselves, the conscience we have been refusing to reconcile with for years. This is the period of life when we must begin to look inside our own hearts and souls rather than outside ourselves for the answers to our problems, for the fixing of the problems. This is the time for facing ourselves, for bringing ourselves into the light.

This is the period of spiritual reflection, of spiritual renewal in life. Now is the time to ask ourselves what kind of person we have been becoming all these years. And do we like that person? Did we become more honest, more decent, more caring, more merciful as we went along because of all these things? And if not, what must we be doing about it now? Can we come eye to eye with our own souls and admit who we are? Can we begin to see ourselves as only part of the universe, just a fragment of it, not its center?

Old people, we’re told, become more difficult as they get older. No. Not at all. They simply become less interested in maintaining their masks, more likely to accept the effort of being human, human beings. They must face what the smallness is and rejoice in the time they have left to turn sweet instead of more sour than ever.

Sister Joan says: A burden of these years is the danger of giving in to our most selfish selves. A blessing of these years is the opportunity to face what it is in us that has been enslaving us, and to let our spirit fly free of whatever has been tying it to the Earth all these years.

1. Answer for yourself Sister Joan’s questions: What kind of person have I become? Am I more honest, more decent, more serene, more caring, more merciful – and if not, what must I do about it?
2. Sister Joan says that one of the blessings of aging is that it provides time for spiritual reflection, spiritual renewal. Is this true in your life? What is nourishing your spirituality as you age?

There is no perfect, no ultimate, no crowning stage of life. Whatever we are now, that is it. If we privilege one stage of life over the others, we stand to miss their pulp. “I have no romantic feelings about age,” Katharine Hepburn once said. “Either you are interesting at any age, or you are not. There is nothing particularly interesting about being old – or being young, for that matter.”

It is good to think back, to remember the people who got us going and doing the things of life and didn’t let us quit. It is good to know where we’ve come from so that we can measure the distance from here to where we are going. It is good to remember all the joys of life so that in dark times we can have confidence that the good times will come back.

It is not good to make the past the acme of our lives. Youth is not a shrine at which we worship once we have moved into another stage of life. It is not good to resist becoming what we are and wishing instead to be what we are not. The temptation, far too often, far too common, is to try to freeze life in place, to become fixated in one phase of it or another, to fail to move beyond the moment.

One of the clearest signs of the way different people view life lies in the way they deal with the death of those dear to them. For some it is the day life stops moving. They stop in their tracks, paralyzed with pain, steeped in loss. For others it is a crossover moment in time. These people face the pain and set about to move with it but beyond it. We’ve all seen both approaches to the end of one phase of life, the beginning of another one, but it can take a while before we understand the implications of what we are doing.

Indeed, life does go on. We cannot arrest it. We must not arrest it. It is not possible to live in the past, however much the temptation to try. If life is for the living and we do not live it, we doom ourselves to premature death. What’s even more pathetic, we do it in the name of the very relationships and places and events that brought us to growth in years gone by. These very seedbeds enable us to trust that new growth will come out of the darkness within us now.

There is a thin line between memory and nostalgia. They are not the same thing. Memory is a recollection. Memories enable us to have faith in the future because they remind us that the past has been so life-giving, so full of hope in all the tomorrows of life. Memories do not so much immerse us in the past as they prod us toward the future. Nostalgia is immersion in the past. It traps us, one foot in the present, one foot in the yesterday. But the melancholy of nostalgia is not the geography of old age. Possibility is.

Nostalgia is a dangerous temptation to confuse love for part of life with love for all of life. It substitutes the delight of the present for the fantasies of the past. It is pining and yearning for what was good for us in the past, but which would be totally out of kilter with the here and now. It is a snapshot of the past, edited to suit us. It is a beguilingly dangerous temptation of old age, this return to an unreal past. It tends to exaggerate the life lived and destroy the life being lived. It affects the way we look at life now. It shapes what we talk about. It makes us interesting for a while, maybe, our stories and their charm – but then it makes us not interesting at all. Ongoing narratives, endlessly repeated narratives, of another time. People do not look to the older generation for nostalgia. They look for wisdom, for courage, for proof that life in all its forms is not only possible but wonderful.

Sister Joan says: The burden of nostalgia is that it takes us out of the present and immobilizes us in the past. The blessing of nostalgia is that it can serve to remind us that just as we survived all of life before this, grew from it, laughed through it, learned from it as well, we can also live through this age with the same grace, same insights – and this time, share that audacious spirit with others.

1. As sister Joan indicates, “Katherine Hepburn once said, ‘Either you are interesting at any age, or you are not.” What are three characteristics you have that make you interesting at this time in your life?

Only children understand the impulsive, impetuous, impelling urge to throw snowballs. Only wise adults realize that unless we throw them, it is unlikely we will ever manage to escape the traces that hold us down, hold us back, at any and every age. But that can only be learned from the young. And they can only learn from us when not to do it. Doug Larson wrote, “the aging process has you firmly in tis grasp if you never get the urge to throw snowballs.”

Getting in touch with the young again is what keeps us in touch with the world. An old tire store sits on the corner of a block of rental homes. Its walls are painted with colorful silhouettes of children, playing piano, dancing, and on a stage. It is a living playhouse called “The Neighborhood Art House,” written in large purple letters above the door. Children can play the drums or practice ballet or read their poems or write their puppet shows or do oil painting and it is all for free, thanks to the people of the city. Impressive.

But just as impressive is to pass that corner in the summertime and see those children sitting bot stark still on chairs on the patio, chin in hands, eyes wide open as well-dressed men and women, all professionals of the city, past and present – lawyers, nurses, corporate types, retirees – sit in the sun and read to them aloud. The patio is filled with almost a hundred children while the parking lot is filled with almost a hundred cars as adults scurry in and out, books under their arms. Each child has a private reader who comes every day to do what no one does for the children making animal sounds or changing voices from one character to another as they go.

They bridge the difference between childhood and parenthood for these children, between freedom and authority, the way grandparents were wont to do in decades past when children and grandparents lived in the same block, same city, the same state. They fill the children with a trust of adults. They open them to adult conversation, to adult influence. They give them refuge from all the rules. They become friends, this child and that adult.

Intergenerational friendships between and older generation and a younger one are as important to the elder as they are to the child. Children give us a lifeline to the present and the future that is denied to us if we sit alone in an independent-living unit. Children release the child in us before it completely withers up and blows away. They connect us to the children of later generations in our own families, the ones we only see once a year or struggle to talk to on the phone. We are meant to be society’s wisdom center its sign of a better life to come, its storehouse of the kind of lore no books talk about.

Once a society divides the human family as a matter of course, there is no family at all anymore. Child daycare, senior living facilities, a totally segregated and fractured society emerge. We lose the connection between the generations and the lessons learned and taught through those connections. We are out of touch with the fulness of the self. Relating to a child who is not theirs enables elders to reach out beyond themselves and the confines of their own private lives to become fully human again. Having elders who are not their parents take an interest in them, showing them things their parents do not have time to do, enables the child to be anchored by an adult who is also not a disciplinarian.

Sister Joan Says: A burden of these years is allowing ourselves to become isolated from the world around us. A blessing of these years is finding a child who will help us to step out of all the old roles and become a human being again.

1. “Intergenerational friendships between an older generation and a younger one are as important to the elder as they are to the child [or young adult].” Send a card to a young person in your life with whom you have become a friend. Tell them why your friendship is so important to you.

“Old age,” in Louis Kronenberger’s view, “is an excellent time for outrage. My goal,” he went on, “is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.” The future is a very sweet part of getting older. It is something to be grasped with fervor. It gets more intense, more alive, more essential every day. It is snapping at the heels, becoming more and more demanding as we go. Most people live as if everything they are not doing now, they could simply do later. For them there is no urgency to life, just a long, quiet movement toward the acme of it. But not everyone. Those who have come roaring into their sixties, full of life, relatively secure, brimming with ideas and finally full of self-confidence, come face-to-face with the meaning of mortality as they never have before. There is, they discover with a jolt, an end to time. Their time.

The very thought of there being no work to get done, no deadlines to meet, no public demands to satisfy, no mountains left to climb, offends everything these people felt was necessary to be alive. Being edged off the upper shelf of life into a kind of shapeless, formless, substanceless nowhereland freezes their very souls. These are the ones who now keep reminding themselves and the rest of their world that “we’re all getting older.”

Another state of mind struggles to come alive now. The sense of urgency that comes with the awareness of time, the thought that there is so much else to life than what we have known till now. There is so much air out there that I have simply not allowed myself to breathe. There is the rest of life to be lived that I have been unaware of until now. Old age, like every other stage of life, is a learning time. It may be here, in fact, that we learn best what life is actually all about.

Old age is the time for letting out the spirit of outrage, the outrageous spirit that comes with having walked through the marketplace of life choosing between its fruits, tasting and discarding as we go. Finally, we know what is missing, know what is good, know what is needed. Now we can let our spirits fly. We can do what our souls demand that fully human beings do. This is the moment for which we were born.

There is nothing that can stop us now. Wherever we are needed, we can go. Whatever we would like to do, we can. Whatever needs must be said, we can say. Old age is the time to be dangerous. Dangerously fun loving, dangerously honest. Dangerously involved. Dangerously alive. This is the time to go, to parties and to political rallies, to music lessons, to the family that waits for us and to strangers who need us. This is not the time to remember that “we are all getting older” – as if getting older were the curse of the damned.

Tomorrow is sacred. It is the great reminder of the gift of life. It is our whole resource. It is everything we have left to give, and it is not without purpose. Most of all, tomorrow is for living, not for simply ambling around through life waiting to die. We will not be given tomorrow simply to allow ourselves to become one day older, one ounce less alive. It is the elderly who are the real signs of what life has been about and is yet meant to be. To abandon such a responsibility smacks of the immoral. “To save one life” as the rabbis say, “is to save the whole world.” To save one life, as we get older, is to live our own life well.

Sister Joan Says: A burden of these years is to assume that the future is already over. A blessing of these years is to give another whole meaning to what it is to be alive, to be ourselves, to be full of life. Our own life.

1. Sister Joan quotes Louis Kroneberger on old age. He said, “Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.” What do you think of this idea? Have you done anything outrageous recently? If not, why not? What is at least one outrageous thing you would like to do at this time in your life?
2. “Old age, like every other stage of life, is a learning time. it may be here in fact that we learn best what life is actually all about.” What are three of the most significant things you have learned as you have aged?

Journal or share your thoughts on these questions.

W. Somerset Maugham wrote, “What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one’s faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one’s memories.” What we often fail to realize is that memory is a mental function, yes, but it is also a choice. We do get to decide which of our memories of a particular time, or person or place, or moment may shape our life in the present moment. Memory is one of the most powerful functions of the human mind. It is also one of life’s most determining ones.

What goes on in memory has a great deal to do with what goes on in all our lives. Memory is a wild horse, unbridled, riderless, maverick. It takes us often where we would not go or takes us back over and over again to where we cannot stay, however much we wish we could.  So, it leaves us always in one state or the other, one place or the other, leaving us either pining or confused. It leaves us, in either case, in a world unfinished in us. The unfinishedness is the price we pay for growing always older.

The young hear memory in the voice of their elders and, delighted by these voices from the past of bored by them, too often miss the content behind the content. There is an energy in memory that is deceiving. The assumption is that since a thing is past, it has no present meaning for us. But nothing could be further from the truth. Whatever is still in memory is exactly what has the most meaning for us. It gives sure sign of what still has emotional significance for us. It tells us what we did that we now miss doing and reminds us of what we didn’t do that we now wish we had.

Memory is many things. It is a call to resolve in us what simply will not go away. It is an invitation to delight in what is gone but is, too, the gold standard of our lives. It is a desire for completion, for continuance of something we once had but lost too soon. It is always an opportunity for healing. Memory is the one function of the human mind that touches the core of us. It tells us what we miss and what we regret and what we have yet to come to peace with if our lives are ever to be really clear.

Memory holds us in contact with those who went before us. It is not meant to cement us in times past. It is the greatest teacher of them all. The task is to come to the point where we can trust our memories to guide us out or the past into a better future. Memory allows treasured lives to live inside of us. And most of all, perhaps, memory also confronts us with the emotions – the feelings, the fears, the struggles – that reside in us yet as unfinished questions and unresolved pain and unfinished joys. They become a blueprint for tomorrow that shows us out of our own experience how to live, how to love, how to forget, how to go on again. Memories are the happy remembrance of possibilities still to be sought, or the now meaningful recall of things yet to be completed.  

Sister Joan Says: A burden of memory in these years is to allow it to meld us into the company of people, time, and places long on by. A blessing of these years is to realize that our memories of both the sad and the happy, the exciting and the secure, the successes and the failures of life are meant to guide us down these last roads with confidence – the confidence that having negotiated the demands of the past we may safely walk into the future.

1. “Without memory we could go blithely on in life without ever really knowing what of that life was still unfinished, was still rumbling around inside of us, waiting for attention.” So says Sister Joan. Can you remember what is still unfinished, still rumbling around inside, still waiting for attention in your life? Write an anonymous column about one or more of these and share it with someone you trust.

“The answer to old age is to keep one’s mind busy and to go on with one’s life as if it were interminable. I always admired Chekhov for building a new house when he was dying of tuberculosis” wrote Leon Edel. To insist on living until we die may be one of life’s greatest virtues. It is easy at any age simply to stop, to be satisfied with what is, to refuse to be more. But when we go on working – at something, for some reason, for someone, for something greater than ourselves – when we go on giving ourselves away right to the very end, we have lived a full life. That is, in fact, the very definition of fullness of life.

What it does not mean is that we will become accustomed, happy even, with allowing ourselves to go to seed, to grow dry and brittle from the inside out, to stop thinking when it is precisely thought that the world needs most. Instead, it is the fine art of going on, of making life something I need to get up for every day. It is a sign to the world around us that we have each and all been put here to make this world different than it was before we came.

The purpose of retirement is to free us from working. It is to free us from being chained to work.  It has something to do only with the kind of work we do. Work is a necessary dimension of spiritual life. Without it, “tilling and keeping” the globe, tending to our own garden of paradise, is impossible. The work we do and the way we do it is what we leave behind for generations to come.

Retirement may be the first time in our lives that we really are free to choose work that brings out the best in us and so brings out the best in the world around us. We become co-creators of the world. The only question is, what work will we do? The answer is whatever work needs to be done where we are!

These years are for the development of the soul. These are the years we learn to paint, or go back to playing an instrument again, or become a Little Leage coach, or visit nursing homes so that the people there, so many of them alone in the world, have someone to talk to about important things.

Sister Joan Says: A burden of these years is that we begin to think of ourselves as superfluous simply because we are no longer tied down to a corporate schedule anymore. A blessing of these years is that they enable us to change our part of the world in ways that are as expressive of us as they are good for others.

1. Sister Joan states that “Work is a necessary dimension of the spiritual life.” Has this been true for you? If yes, explain several ways your work informed your spiritual life. If no, give a reason or two why not. Journal or discuss your choice.
2. “…retirement does not free us from the responsibility to go on tending the world,” according to Sister Joan. If you are retired, how have you continued to “tend the world?”

Carl Jung taught, “For a younger person, it is almost a sin and certainly a danger to be too much occupied with himself. But for the aging person it is the duty and a necessity to give serious attention to himself. After having lavished it light upon the world, the sun withdraws its rays in order to illumine itself.” Carl Jung brought to human awareness the notion that life develops in stages, some of them more centered on the outside world, others of them focused almost entirely on interiority, on reflection on the search for meaning. The end stage of life, it seems, has something to do with making sense out of everything that has gone before it. It also requires the courage to brave the answers to questions about what happened to us and why, how we handled what happened to us and, most of all, what it means to us now.

This can only be done in the center of the soul and with brutal honesty. Now is the time to stop excusing ourselves. This is the time to drain the cross of life and to celebrate its victories over the self – even the victories unknown to those who think they know us best. Certainly, the ones that made new and better people out of us. That kind of thinking and reflection is only really done well when it is done alone, in solitude. All the people we have ever known, still very much alive in us, come back again to help us see where we have been, to understand what we have become, to help us chart what it will take to make these final years our best ones.

Aloneness is the new monastery of the elderly. Sometimes a conscious choice. There are a growing number of single people of all ages living alone now. In old age, however, aloneness is, more than likely, not chosen at all. It is simply thrust upon us. It brings with it none of the romantic images of cabins or beaches. Now it is only an empty house or a small apartment in the new housing complex for the elderly that has become so common with the rise of the nuclear family.

The problem with solitude is that we often confuse it with aloneness or isolation. Isolation means that we are cut off from the rest of the world by circumstances over which we have no control; people don’t respond to us, for instance, no matter how hard we try to make contact with them. We live outside the mainstream. We are too sick, lame, shy, angry, far away from people to have any kind of social life. Isolation is either separation or alienation from the world around us.

Solitude is chosen. It is the act of being alone to be with ourselves. We seek solitude for the sake of the soul. Solitude opens us to the wonders of a world without noise, clutter, and purged of the social whirl. At least for a while. At least long enough to immerse ourselves in the balm of simply being. Then the silence outside ourselves enables us to go inside ourselves. It’s in the center of the soul where the unspoken in us runs deep. Here are the ideas we long ago refused to allow ourselves to think and yet could never not think. In solitude we have the opportunity to take them out, turn them over in our mind, look at them, own them or disown them once and for all.

Is the old anger worth it? Was the loss really a loss in the long run? If we didn’t do what we wanted to do, in what way did we grow instead? It’s in solitude where we come to peace with ourselves and the life that is behind us now. We are beyond it now, not able to be hurt by it now, no longer humiliated by it now. Whatever we have done, wherever we have been in life, we are what we are because of it. Stronger because of it, perhaps.

There is life to be lived in the last years that ought not to end infected by what went on before this. We have an obligation now to live well with the people around us who are making this new life possible. We owe them the best we have. And the best that is in us is what is undefiled by the past. Are we living now the happiest way we can in the circumstances we’re in? Solitude is what enables us to illuminate for ourselves whatever it is in us that is making that impossible.

Sister Joan Says: A burden of these years is that we fail to understand that solitude is the gift that comes naturally to those who take the time and the space to explore their core. A blessing of these years is that solitude is their natural state, the gift of reflection that makes the present a contented place to be.

1. “Solitude is chosen. It is the act of being alone in order to be with ourselves. We seek solitude for the sake of the soul,” Sister Joan writes. Is choosing solitude one of your regular or daily spiritual practices? If yes, discuss or journal about what value it has for you. If not, what are the obstacles that prevent you from choosing solitude.

Maggie Kuhn said, “Old age is not a disease. It is strength and survivorship.” When we ignore the fact that all of us are on an inexorable journey to our own old age, we miss the gift of years. We miss the profound insight that we are never too young to begin to see ourselves as old, to imagine ourselves as now, at this moment, shaping what we will be in years to come – as well as the way we will become it.

Maggie Kuhn left seminary work at the age of sixty-five and founded what became one of the most influential groups of retired people the world had ever known, the Gray Panthers. The group was dedicated to nursing-home reform, to the elimination of agism, and to the eradication of the social concept of “disengagement,” the notion that older people should be beyond, outside, disengaged from the public arena. A whole new population was speaking out against ageism. Legislation, economic support, and public awareness emerged. The elderly were alive and well and on the move. We are their inheritors.

Is it realistic to think that the elderly elderly – eighty-year-olds- can possibly have any real effect on public issues? Whatever the limitations of each of them might be separately, according to Maggie Kuhn, “Old people constitute America’s biggest untapped and undervalued human energy source.” More than that, they teach the rest of the population, all of its various age groups, something about the power of limitations. They make us rethink the entire function and meaning of ‘limitation.”

Limitations – those physical boundaries that the old reach before the rest of the world – are only that, elders show us. They are boundaries not barriers. They limit us, they take time and energy, but they do not stop us unless we decide to be stopped. In fact, limitations in one area simply make us develop in another. Imitations, at any age and every age, call out something in us that we never considered before.

They also alert us to the needs of others. Once our own eyes are not as good as they once were, we want visual aids for everyone. Being limited gives us an opportunity to learn both humility and patience. We aren’t as arrogant anymore as we used to be. Just as we learn to do routine physical things differently, we can keep attempting to find another way to get a Congressperson on the phone, to launch a petition to get a letter to the editor published in the paper.

Finally, limitations invite others to get involved as well. We create a community out of the needs of others and the gifts we can bring to them while they, in turn, enrich us. We become connected to the rest of the human race, all of whom are just as limited as we are, whether they know it yet or not. Limitations are the mutual stock of the human race. By helping ourselves we also help others. By helping others, we extend our own reach.

We are only as limited as we want to be. When we define ourselves only by our limitations, we fail to see to what greater things those limitations are calling us for. Age and limitations are no excuse for being a nonperson in a world that needs icons of truth and courage, vision, and possibility as never before. What the world wants in the elderly is: wisdom, truth, and the sign of a better future for us all.

Sister Joan says: A burden of these years is the possibility that we might succumb to our limitations as if they were the real definition of age, rather than an aspect of everyone’s life. A blessing of these years is that we know at last what really matters, and the world is waiting to hear it, if only we will make the effort and don’t give in to our limitations.

1. According to Sister Joan, “Limitations… are boundaries not barriers.” Is this true for someone older you know? Explain through journaling or discussion.
2. “Being limited gives us an opportunity to learn both humility and patience,” states Sister Joan. Recall a limitation you have experienced or are now dealing with. Discuss or write about how it taught both humility and patience.

“In a dream you are never eighty,” Anne Sexton wrote. Our dreams reveal to us the basic truth of life: years are biological; the spirit is eternal. The number of our years does not define us. Deep down where our souls live, we stay forever young. It is this surging, driving force that brings us to the bar of life every day of our lives, whatever our age, however much we have been through, prepared to live life to the hilt again. It is our own fault if we refuse to think again all the great ideas of life – and our own position on each of them.

The personality and the soul within an aging body stays always alert, ever dynamic. Even when we find ourselves less physically active than we may once have been, the mind wrestles with the ideas of the soul, the heart reviews over and over again every emotional moment of life, every major turn along the way. We are forever in motion, as long as we live, one way or another. To stay alive, fully alive, then, we must open ourselves to life’s eternal dream.

We must dream to be better people tomorrow than we were today. We must be willing to rethink all the ideas that have kept us bound until this moment. Are they still believable? Do we ourselves still believe them? And if we do not, what does that mean in regard to what we say to those younger people who have been influenced by these ideas because of us?

One of the problems of the modern world is that we are more fascinated with technology than we are with the spiritual. We are good at reporting every technical or scientific advance the world has ever spawned but other elements of life, more profound and impacting on human society, are inclined to be missed entirely. One of them has special meaning to the aging. One of them shows us that the dreams that determine the ultimate quality of our lives never die, are never too late to be grasped. It is the ability of humans to change their minds, to begin again, to start over, to be someone else.

Robert McNamara, past Secretary of Defense, one of the chief architects of our part in the Vietnam war, and consultant for the documentary The Fog of War, told the public that he had thought it over and could no longer support the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Nor could he condone his own part in it. He had reflected again on what he had done in the past, why he had done it what he thought about it then and now and came to a startling conclusion: “Although we sought to do the right thing – and believed we were doing the right thing – in my judgement, hindsight proves us wrong.” This change of perspective took place twenty-five years after the end of the war.

The very act of reviewing one’s own values, then and now, stands as a marker for us all. It reminds us that it is possible to learn as we go through life. It is even more important to be open to doing it and willing to report it. Life grows us. Life opens us as we age to think differently, even about ourselves. Whatever our physical age, we must go on dreaming of the desirable so that we can do our bit to make it happen. We must allow ourselves to dream about what life could really be like if enough of us demanded that it were. But to do that means to open for examination all the assumptions that have driven the world to this point. All of them. In our dreams lies the unfinished work for the world.

Sister Joan says: A burden of these years is that we come to think that our dreaming days are over. Then we become mired in the past. We refuse to grow. We make past mistakes the definition of our entire life. A blessing of these years is the power to dream and the freedom it takes to bring to the awareness of our world – however small, however boundaried it may be – the voice of reflection, of reason of feeling, of penetrating awareness that comes with having been wrong and setting our to right it.

1. Sister Joan suggests that “In our dreams, in the way we ourselves see ourselves, we are forever becoming.” Share in your journal or through discussion, one or more ways you can say that you are still “forever becoming.”

“Old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read,” said Francis Bacon. There is something about getting older that tempts us to settle down a bit. We begin to run the ruts in the road, not because we cannot find our way to other paths, other places, other people but because we really don’t want to make the effort it takes to do it. New people, ideas, patterns not only take effort, but also demand new attention. The thought of familiar, on the other hand, comforts us. It assures us that life, as we have known it, is still there, stable, secure. Settling into a routine of friends, foods, places and plans is easier and fulfilling. These things are our identity as well as our pleasure. They say who we are and who we have always been, where we belong and why.

There is a cost to settling into the routine of being what we have always been. The cost of familiarity is the angst of loss, the anxiety that comes with feeling more and more alone. As one thing after another goes, an awareness that we are becoming a world unto ourselves grows. A natural melancholy sets in as the years pass by. Little by little, the world that shaped us fades away. But then one day, in a rush, all the beauties of those years come roaring through us in an emotional whirlwind. The problem is that nobody cares about them now but us. Those years have taken with them a part of ourselves. Is it to be mourned - or celebrated - for its disappearance?

The remembrance of the days we learned to kneel for our nightly prayers and stand up straight to sing our hymns has nothing of absolute value to maintain the present. But what is worth wondering about is whether we still have any of that piety in us. The pain that comes with the remembrance of piety lost is a good kind of pain. It means that there is something in us that still holds on to the innocence of childhood. Only after the rules have been broken – after we stop worrying about whether the passions of youth endanger salvation- are the lessons really learned. If we forget the presence of God in our lives we find ourselves terribly alone. No doubt about it, there are moments from the past which, when they flash back, carry the sting of new awareness.

Ageing well is the real goal of life. To allow ourselves to age without vitality, energy, purpose, and growth is simply to get old rather than to age well as we go. Aging is the process by which we face the tasks of every level of life. Life is meant to form us in independence, usher us into an adulthood that begins in apprenticeship and ends in mastery. Those tasks accomplished bring us to the acme of integrity, of wisdom, of eldership in the community of the world.

Remember the great heroes, noble ideas, and the fine deeds that we ourselves inherited from the past. They focused our hearts on higher goals when we were young. They filled us with the notions of the grandeur of the soul. What happened to those? What happened to us? Were we up to the level of any of them at all? There is unfinished business aplenty to do, too many things left unsaid, too much teaching yet to be done if we are ever to do our part in making our world as good as those heroes of earlier generations made theirs.

Sister Joan Says: A burden of these years is the desire to give in to the natural sadness that comes with the shifting journey through life, to cling to it in ways that make living in the present a dour and depressing prospect. A blessing of these years is the realization that there is still so much for us to do that we have no time, no right to be sad.

The next series of lessons that we will be covering come from the Learn It, Live It, Bible Studies unit on the Fruit of the Spirit. The lessons will focus on Galatians 5:22-23. The Christians in Galatia were confused about their faith. Error had crept into their teaching, and the church was becoming increasingly legalistic. Paul wrote to the Galatians to call them back to the gospel of grace. He explained in very strong language that everything we are, as Christians, comes from God and from Christ’s death and resurrection. There is nothing to gain by keeping the Jewish law – our salvation comes solely from our faith in Christ.

Paul passionately urged the Galatians to live a life of freedom in the Holy Spirit rather than to fall back into the pointless practice of living by the law. He eloquently compared the life the Galatians had left, a life controlled by the sinful nature, to the life they can have in Christ, a life guided by God’s Holy Spirit. Living by the sinful nature is a life of slavery and it produces wickedness. Living by the Spirit produces the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

This Bible study will help us to learn about each of these qualities and how we can live by God’s Spirit and grow in fruitfulness. We will be breaking down the lessons to cover 2-3 weeks on each element. If you have a friend or friends to discuss the lessons with, please make a commitment to each other for that discussion time and place. If you are journaling, mark that time on your calendar so that you can be sure to get into it.

Living by the Spirit produces the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These lessons are to help you learn about each of these qualities and how you can live by God’s Spirit and grow in fruit. Find a quiet place with a peaceful view or play some soothing music to get you ready to grow in your faith. Journal about or discuss the lessons with a friend or two. Go back to the lesson and take a second look to see if you discover something new or have a change of perspective. It is your journey to take, and the path always leads to a closer relationship with God.

We are told in 1 John 4:19, “We love because he first loved us.” Why do you think it is significant that love is the first quality of the fruit of the Spirit Paul mentions?

The Beatles tell us that all we need is love. This may not be literally true, but there can be little doubt that love is what many, if not most, yearn for. When we have the Holy Spirit in our lives, the Spirit helps us love others. The Spirit does this by planting and growing the love of Jesus Christ within us.

It is not always easy to love others. We can be tempted to strike out or walk away from difficult people. When we cannot love through our own power, we can do so by the Spirit. The Spirit will help us to love in difficult situations.

We must learn to rely on the Spirit to help us love the people around us. We must learn to give love so that we may receive love.

Read John 13:34-35 Why is it important to be loving? Is it possible to be a Christian without being loving?

Matthew 4:43-48, Luke 10:25-37, John 15:9-13, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, 1 John 4-7, 16b-20

What is the most important insight each of these passages gives us about love? What challenges do these passages present us?

We will continue with the quality of love next week.

Living by the Spirit produces the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These lessons are to help you learn about each of these qualities and how you can live by God’s Spirit and grow in fruit. Find a quiet place with a peaceful view or play some soothing music to get you ready to grow in your faith. Journal about or discuss the lessons with a friend or two. Go back to the lesson and take a second look to see if you discover something new or have a change of perspective. It is your journey to take, and the path always leads to a closer relationship with God.
 
Galatians 5:22, Matthew 5:43-48, Luke 10:25-37, John 13:34-35 & 15:9-13, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, 1 John 4:7-12 & 16b-20. These are the verses that we looked at last week. Refresh your thoughts about these passages with new eyes and some distance from the initial reactions you may have had.

What happens when we, as Christians, live lives of love? What makes living a life of love difficult? When a Christian has a difficult time loving a person or a group of people, what can he or she do?

Meanings of Love There are four Greek words that mean “love.’

• Eros: This means romantic or sexual love. It is love based on natural biological attraction.Philea: This means what we commonly call “brotherly love.” It is love based on common interests and the affinity one might have for someone who has a similar view of life.
• Stergo: This means the love between parents and children. It can sometimes refer to the love between a pet and its owner or the love a people feel for a leader.
• Agape: This means love without expectation of receiving a benefit in return. It is the kind of love that God has for us. This is the word that Paul uses in Galatians 5:22 when he says the fruit of the Spirit is “love.”

When you think of the word love, what do you usually think of? What does it mean to you that the kind of love Paul says is the fruit of the Spirit is agape? What do you need to do to start showing this fruit more in your life? How does the Holy Spirit grow the fruit of love in our lives? What is our role in becoming people who are known for loving others?

“This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we’re most sure that love can’t conquer all, it seems to anyway. It goes down into the rat hole with us, in the guise of our friends, and there it swells and comforts.” Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith.

How have friends shown you this kind of love? What happens to relationships when people show God’s love to each other?

Read Romans 5:6-8 How did Jesus exemplify this idea of love going “down into the rat hole with us?

Reread John 13:35 If you made John 13:35 your personal mission statement, how would that affect your daily life? To answer this question, consider your career, your finances, your hobbies, your church life, your relationship with your family and neighbors, and all other components of your life.

Living by the Spirit produces the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These lessons from the Learn It, Live It Bible Studies are to help you learn about each of these qualities and how you can live by God’s Spirit and grow in fruit. Find a quiet place with a peaceful view or play some soothing music to get you ready to grow in your faith. Journal about or discuss the lessons with a friend or two. Go back to the lesson and take a second look to see if you discover something new or have a change of perspective. It is your journey to take, and the path always leads to a closer relationship with God.

Galatians 5:22-23 – Joy

Jesus said in John 10:10, “I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly”. To have life abundantly is more than to have a life that never ends; rather, it is to have life as God originally intended it to be, full of meaning and joy. But the truth is that many of us don’t experience life in that way. For far too many of us, life too easily becomes humdrum.

Perhaps this is why writer C.S. Lewis titled the biography of his early life Surprised by Joy. He went from nominal Christianity to embracing atheism before finally being converted to a more vital Christian faith. Joy came through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Joy is something different than being happy or excited all of the time. Instead, joy is being able to maintain a strongly positive feeling about life and to praise God for life even in the midst of sorrows and setbacks. This is the quality Paul had and urged on others when he wrote from a Roman jail, “Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again, Rejoice!” (Philippians 4:4).

The Holy Spirit helps us to have and maintain this attitude of joy.
How would you define Joy? How is it different from similar concepts such as happiness, excitement, or ecstasy?
 
Read Psalm 103:1-5, Psalm 105:1-3, and Psalm 106:1-3.

Fruit of the Spirit
Living by the Spirit produces the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These lessons from the Learn It, Live It Bible Studies are to help you learn about each of these qualities and how you can live by God’s Spirit and grow in fruit. Find a quiet place with a peaceful view or play some soothing music to get you ready to grow in your faith. Journal about or discuss the lessons with a friend or two. Go back to the lesson and take a second look to see if you discover something new or have a change of perspective. It is your journey to take, and the path always leads to a closer relationship with God.

Galatians 5:22-23 – Peace

In this world that is wrapped up in anxiety, we worry. Terrorism, violence in our schools, global warming, stock markets all drive our emotions toward worry. Any hope of having true and lasting peace in the midst of this is, for many, a pipe dream. Still, Scripture comes to us and tells us that the fruit of the Spirit is peace. What can that mean for us in a world like ours?

The Hebrew word for “peace” is shalom. It means more than just the absence of conflict. It is a positive state of inner harmony and well-being. This kind of peace consists of three attitudes.
First is self-acceptance. We need to be glad to be the person God made us to be. Guilt and feelings of inadequacy wage war on our psyche.

Second is positive hope for the world. It helps to keep us from the constant turmoil of wondering what horrible news will arrive next.

Third is confidence in one’s future. We know who holds the future! Confidence about one’s future means we don’t have to fret over whether we will ever “make something of ourselves.” We know the real issue is what God will make of us, and God never fails. Knowing that is real peace!

Take a moment to be silent and quiet your mind. For two minutes focus on and repeat a Scripture over and over. Psalm 46:10a or Isaiah 26: 3 would be a viable choice.
 
Were you able to experience peace during this exercise? What natural setting comes to mind for you when you hear the word peace? Is there a moment in your life that you remember feeling most at peace? What destroys your peace? What encourages it?

Fruit of the Spirit
Living by the Spirit produces the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These lessons from the Learn It, Live It Bible Studies are to help you learn about each of these qualities and how you can live by God’s Spirit and grow in fruit. Find a quiet place with a peaceful view or play some soothing music to get you ready to grow in your faith. Journal about or discuss the lessons with a friend or two. Go back to the lesson and take a second look to see if you discover something new or have a change of perspective. It is your journey to take, and the path always leads to a closer relationship with God.

Galatians 5:22-23 – Peace Cont.

A quotation from Harry Emerson Fosdick, in his book Living Under Tension, is worth considering regarding peace. It was written in 1941 for context.

“Here in this immediate, factual world we see such catastrophe and brutality as will make our generation rememberable for its horror many a century from now. And yet we inhabit a spiritual world as well, with intellectual insights, with ideals of beauty and loveliness, with faiths and friendships, and with aspirations that lay hold on God and goodness. If we could only live all in one world or all in the other, we might have peace, but what tension is involved in having to live in both!”
 
Consider the horrors and the stresses of the age Fosdick was living in. How do those stresses compare with today’s stresses?

Do you experience the tension Fosdick describes when he writes of living both in the world and in the kingdom of God? How does that tension affect our sense of peace? How can we have peace in these times?
 
Isaiah 9:2-7, 11:6-9, 32:17-20; Micah 4:2-4; Revelation 21:1-4
Luke 2:14; Ephesians 2:14-18
1 Peter 3:8-12
James 3:13-18

Fruit of the Spirit
Living by the Spirit produces the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These lessons from the Learn It, Live It Bible Studies are to help you learn about each of these qualities and how you can live by God’s Spirit and grow in fruit. Find a quiet place with a peaceful view or play some soothing music to get you ready to grow in your faith. Journal about or discuss the lessons with a friend or two. Go back to the lesson and take a second look to see if you discover something new or have a change of perspective. It is your journey to take, and the path always leads to a closer relationship with God.

Galatians 5:22-23 – Patience

“Lord, give me patience and I want it now!” Kids, school, clubs, plans, finances, jobs; all of these stretch us too far and fray our threads of patience. Of all the qualities of the fruit of the Spirit, patience may be the most difficult to acquire. Instant gratification is the way of the day and who has time to wait, persevere, endure? We are more likely to demand, “Lord, give me patience!” than to practice patience by simply waiting on God to work through our circumstances.

The thesaurus lists the following words under the entry for patience. Tolerance, acceptance, leniency, sweet reasonableness, forbearance, sufferance, endurance, long-suffering, stoicism, fortitude, perseverance, uncomplainingness, nonresistance. (Roget’s International Thesaurus, Fourth Edition)
 
Read the following examples of impatience:

• Exodus 24:12-28, 32:1-4
• Habakkuk 1:1-4
• Luke 10:38-42

Fruits of the Spirit
Galatians 5:22-23 – Patience Cont.
 
It’s one of the world’s rarest flowers – so rare that it was seen in bloom only about twenty times in the United States in the last century. Its scarcity isn’t the only thing that has made as many as 76,000 people line up for a look at it.

The titan arum is also the world’s largest bloom. Just the bloom can measure eight feet tall and four feet across. The plant, which is native to Indonesia, must be tended patiently and exactingly for weeks or months before the grower is rewarded with a bloom. The plant blooms only a few times in its forty-year life span and the bloom only lasts about seventy-two hours before it collapses on itself due to its tremendous weight.

But what makes this rare flower worth the wait isn’t its size either, but rather its scent. Scent may be too polite a word. The flower is also known as the corpse flower. Its scent has been described as a nauseating rotten-flesh, or ripe manure smell. In fact, in one nursery in Michigan, the plant had to be moved outside when it was in full bloom, and even so, people reported that the smell “would take your breath away” if you were twenty yards downwind of it.


Jot down your thoughts about patience as you read these passages:
Proverbs 14:29, 15:18, 19:11, 25:15
Romans 12:12, 1 Corinthians 13:4, Ephesians 4:2, 2 Timothy 4:2

Fruit of the Spirit
Living by the Spirit produces the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These lessons from the Learn It, Live It Bible Studies are to help you learn about each of these qualities and how you can live by God’s Spirit and grow in fruit. Find a quiet place with a peaceful view or play some soothing music to get you ready to grow in your faith. Journal about or discuss the lessons with a friend or two. Go back to the lesson and take a second look to see if you discover something new or have a change of perspective. It is your journey to take, and the path always leads to a closer relationship with God.

Galatians 5:22-23 – Patience

“Lord, give me patience and I want it now!” Kids, school, clubs, plans, finances, jobs; all of these stretch us too far and fray our threads of patience. Of all the qualities of the fruit of the Spirit, patience may be the most difficult to acquire. Instant gratification is the way of the day and who has time to wait, persevere, endure? We are more likely to demand, “Lord, give me patience!” than to practice patience by simply waiting on God to work through our circumstances.

The thesaurus lists the following words under the entry for patience. Tolerance, acceptance, leniency, sweet reasonableness, forbearance, sufferance, endurance, long-suffering, stoicism, fortitude, perseverance, uncomplainingness, nonresistance. (Roget’s International Thesaurus, Fourth Edition)


Read the following examples of impatience:

• Exodus 24:12-28, 32:1-4
• Habakkuk 1:1-4
• Luke 10:38-42

Fruit of the Spirit

Galatians 5:22-23 – Kindness Part B

The publisher of the book God Within issued an invitation to young adults to submit writings about their spiritual or religious lives. The book reflects the opinions of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Wiccans, agnostics, and atheists. The author of the essay “Simply Complicated” writes that at one time she was a fervent Christian, but at the time of this writing, she felt abandoned by and disillusioned with God, preferring to follow no God than to follow a God she couldn’t commit to wholeheartedly. The following is a quote from this essay:

“When I say I worship God, am I really saying that I worship a being that pretends to love the world while only caring for himself? I ask myself, ‘If this God is the selfish maniac he appears to be, how can I spend my entire life worshiping him? What a waste of a life that I could dedicate to something better.”

How do people miss seeing God’s kind nature?

What can Christians do to help the world see the kindness of God?

From the Random Acts of Kindness website, we find this description of what happens when kindness takes hold of someone.

“As people tap into their own generous human spirit and share kindness with one another, they discover for themselves the power of kindness to effect positive change. When kindness is expressed, healthy relationships are created, community connections are nourished, and people are inspired to pass kindness on.”

What motivates people in general to be kind? – What difference does kindness make in the world?

What should motivate Christians to be kind? – How does the Holy Spirit grow kindness in us?

What is our role in that process?
 

Kindness Quotes – The Random Acts of Kindness Foundation (randomactsofkindness.org)

• “Kindness is being someone who makes everyone feel like a somebody.”
• “Kindness can make a bad day good, and a good day better.”
• “Kindness is like a seed that when cultivated can grow and grow and grow.”
• “Kindness is the ability to know what the right thing to do is and having the courage to do it!!”

Write out or chat with a friend about how these quotes resonate in your daily life. Do they go along with what the bible verses revealed last week?

(Jeremiah 9:24 & 31:3, Hosea 11:4, and Romans 2:4, Proverbs 11:17, 12:25, 14:31, Luke 6:27-35,      1 Corinthians 13:4, Ephesians 4:32, 1 Thessalonians 5:15, 2 Timothy 2:22-24, 2 Peter 1:5-9)

“For age is opportunity no less / Than you itself, though in another dress,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow observed. “And as the evening twilight fades away / The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.” He speaks clearly of the mystery of the later years of life, the satisfaction of it all. And yet one of the obstacles to living an exciting life in our later years is that we become so sure we’re losing something and so unaware of what we’re gaining. To live into the mystery of this stage of life, it is important to allow ourselves to break out of the confines of the old one. We have learned so well how to live the rules of life. We are not so sure how to live its freedoms.

Being cemented in our personal little worlds creates the problem of not exploring strange streets or wasting precious moments in the exploration of new shops. We become repetitive. Routine seeps into every dimension of life. Some of it is comforting, of course. Routine is what lets us know what to do and just when and how to do it. However, it can turn us into lower-level robots who do not think enough to realize that we’re not thinking much about anything at all. It’s that from which old age liberates us. Routine can finally give way to mystery, to possibility, to the grazing time of life.

The problem is that it can take a long, long time before it feels like liberation. Only getting older frees us, despite ourselves, from ourselves. It gives us the opportunity to stray as we have never strayed in our lives. Why not, in fact, walk into the mystery of life until we are comfortable enough with mystery to trust it even at the end? Schedules and deadlines have a place in life, of course. The keep us accountable to society. The problem starts when they rule our lies, when they obstruct our lives, when they become our lives.

Mystery is what happens to us when we allow life to evolve rather than having to make it happen all the time. Just to see, notice, be there. There is something holy-making about simply presuming that what happens to us in any given is sent to awaken our souls to something new: another smell, a different taste, a moment when we allow ourselves to lock eyes with a stranger, to smile a bit, to nod our head in greeting.

Astonishment shakes us into conscious awareness of things long seen, but long unseen as well. Those things are the essence of mystery. There is purpose to mystery in a coolly calculated world. For the most part, we have learned to deny the right of the unexpected, the mysterious, to invade our neatly scheduled lives at all. In age, nothing is very sure anymore. Mystery comes alive. Something will surely happen. What will it be?

As the years go by, we learn to trust the goodness of time, the glorious cornucopia of life called God. At the end of life, the mystery waiting for us there, finally visible under the glare of time, may be more than the soul can hold.

Sister Joan Says: “A burden of these years is to fear the ever-approaching mystical before us, as if the God-ness we have known in life will desert us in death. A blessing of these years is coming to see that behind everything so stolid, so firm, so familiar in front of us runs a descant of mystery and meaning to be experienced in ways we never thought possible before. To become free of the prosaic and the scheduled and the pragmatic is to break the world open in ways we never dreamed of. In this new world, a mountain, a bench, a grassy path is far more than simply itself. It is a symbol of unprecedented possibilities, of the holiness of time.

• Sister Joan states that relationships “…are a sign of the presence of a loving God in life”. Write a letter, email, or poem to someone who has been or who is this for you and share why. (The poem does not have to be original.)
• For many, old age does not feel like liberation, according to Sister Joan. She claims, “We resist it mightily. We make our own prisons and live in them till we’re too numb to try to get away.” Do you agree? If yes, why? Name some “prisons” that victimize older people.

“Old Age is an island surrounded by death,” wrote the Ecuadorian essayist Juan Montalvo. At its core, life is not about things, it is about relationships. It is the hands we go on holding in our hearts at the end that define the kind of life we have led. Our relationships determine the quality of life as we have known it. They show us the face of God on Earth. They are what batter our hearts into the feelings of life.

When the relationships we forge as we go begin to disappear, our own life changes. We know then what it is to be abandoned, to be a little less impervious to feeling that we thought we were. Now it is not things we need, it is understanding we crave. It is understanding that draws us out of ourselves into the earthenware vessel of new life.

As we watch loved ones leave us, we come to another crossover moment in time. We wonder, what do we do now? Go on alone? Stop and withdraw into ourselves? Risk the chance of becoming a friend again? It is a life-changing question. It is a soul-changing answer. And, for fear we might miss the lesson of it, the pain of it is everywhere. The loss is clear: once our mates go, so, in a way, do we. When this occurs, we can be tempted to hide in a collection of graying photographs, to insulate ourselves from the risk of being vulnerable again, to allow emotional death to take us before physical death arrives.

People once laughed at old people who fell in love. Marriage was out of the question. The primary purpose of marriage had for so long been defined as child-rearing that the role of adult relationships, especially in later life, had been dismissed. As a result, unlike those in any other phase of life, older people are forced to deal with the challenge of two very different types of relationships. First, the haunting presence of relationships lost to death or distance and second, the effort it takes to make new friends, new companions in their own world, which is becoming ever more removed from the faster-moving world around them. The temptation to disengage is severe, yet our need for understanding and comfort and a sense of presence is greater than ever.

How is this shell of a life ever to be filled again? And if it is not filled, is there any real life yet to be had? Relationships are the sign of the presence of a loving God in life. There is no such thing at any stage of human development as life without relationships. The only uncertainty is whether we will decide to live inside ourselves, or trust that life can be made glorious again by new meetings, new moments, new spirits.

For this to happen, we need to reach out first. We need to make ourselves interesting again. We need to learn how to invite people into our lives. Then we need to make the effort to go out to places where people our own age gather, as well as to events where the generations mix and the fun comes from meeting new people and talking about different things.

Sister Joan says: “A burden of these years is that being alone, bad as it feels, is easier than doing what it takes to be with someone else. It would be so much easier now simply to close the sunshades of our soul and give up. So much easier simply to wait for death to claim what has already died in us – a love for life and a trust in its essential goodness. So, we cut ourselves out of our own lives and watch them wither away. A blessing of these years is that they offer us the chance to be excited by new personalities, new warmth, new activities, new people all over again. Does it demand that we fall in love? No. But it does demand that we love someone else enough to be just as interested in them as we are in ourselves. It demands that we se out to make tomorrow happy.”

1. Sister Joan states that relationships “… are a sign of the presence of a loving God in life.” Write a letter, email, or poem to someone who has been or who is this for you and share why. (The poem does not have to be original.) Share your thoughts on this or journal your choice.
2. Tell the story of an older person in your life who, having lost a spouse, loved one or dear friend, has been a role model for you in terms of how she or he comped with such a loss. Journal this story for reflection and discuss it with someone.