Old as we feel

I got up this morning after a 24-hour lapse, and I noticed how I've changed over the years.

Where I drank coffee black for more than 20 years, now I take creamer and some sort of fake sugar product.

Where I once seemed to want to grow beards and it took forever, I pop up pretty good after a day of basically lying in bed.

Where once I could stay up practically all night, now I can't stay up past nine on a good night.

What has happened.

Old is as old feels, one figures, and I feel old. Now, much of my ministry is to persons much older than myself, but it doesn't seem to matter as to how old I feel. I feel old. I dreamed last night that I was having, or someone was having, a contemporary worship service and I grabbed the old mandolin and was basically shooed form the stage by the band who said they would take it from there.

I feel old. I feel as if I don't have a choice any more. I feel as if old is simply who I am and who I am going to be and that's all there is.

I feel as if the ministry I have doesn't work for younger people because they can look at the old fat guy and if it ain't Christmas, they don't connect.

I feel old. Bones weary. Back killing me. Shoulder protesting. Hips shouting their remorse.

I feel old.

There was a time when it was important to be elderly. The Bible talks of  “Go, assemble the elders of Israel and say to them, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—appeared to me and said: I have watched over you and have seen what has been done to you in Egypt. And I have promised to bring you up out of your misery in Egypt into the land of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—a land flowing with milk and honey.’"

If something was going to happen, the Lord wanted the elders gathered together to get the message. Now?

I feel old. I'm changing. I read the paper to find out what is going to happen to my medicare and my Medicaid and my social security and I admit I can't even tell them apart because I never paid attention.

There was a newspaper story yesterday about me and my book and they ran a photo and my only thought was, "Oh, I feel old," when I saw the photo. I'm not just old. I'm irrelevant. I can't even get a story in the little local newspaper I wouldn't have agreed to work for 10 years ago. Ten years ago I ...

I feel old.