Not too many weeks ago I was on the campus of Dallas Baptist University one evening visiting with the Crawfords right before they joined our church.  Aaron and Kay are dorm parents at DBU and, as we were walking out of the dorm, we ran into one of the students who lives in their dorm.  Before we could say a word this young man looked at me and asked Aaron, "is that your dad?"  Now, when things like that happen I have to admit that I sometimes lose my diplomatic edge and just blurt out something like I did that night when I said, "Dad!!??  How old do you think I am?"  Wrong question.   Nonetheless, this student had the right answer.  "Well," he said, "I just wanted to know if that is where Aaron gets all his good looks."  With that kind of quick wit and disarming skill that boy needs to run for Governor some day.

Well, maybe, if things like that were rare occurrences it wouldn't be so bad.  But, they seem to be happening with greater frequency.  Even five years ago, not long after a waitress taking our order asked Cameron if he was having a good time with grandpa that day, I had a young lady working the counter at a McDonald's ask me if I wanted the Senior discount with my morning coffee.  Needless to say that was anything but a happy meal.  And, since then I have decided that, from now on, if I'm asked if I want the Senior discount I'm going to say, "you bet!"  The truth is I'm not yet old enough to qualify for membership in AARP.  The truth also is that I am old enough to be the father of a college student.  Part of what keeps me confused, however, is that my boys are still in elementary and Middle school.  And, since we parents too often make the mistake of measuring our progress by the progress of our children, I think of myself as younger than I am.  It's a perception thing, don't you see?  Like the way we all tend to look in the mirror well into our forties and are willing to swear that we really haven't changed that much since the day we graduated from high school.

Soon enough we get a wake up call, though.  Like Robert Sloan tells me he did when he recently turned fifty and "felt another yank on the chain."  The same one he felt in his mid-forties, he says, except that this one came sooner than the first and apparently with a little more yank.  It has gotten his attention.  Like it got mine this past week, when viewing the video we produced to promote the Thank Offering, I saw myself as I never quite had before.  I didn't realize all this time how little I had on top and how gray what little there is had become or that I had been wearing my grandfather's nose around all this time.  It's a perception thing, don't you see?   What we see, or, what we want to see, is one thing.  But, it is not what we would see if we were looking for the right thing.  The thing that is really happening that can't be seen with mere human vision.  There is a transformation taking place here of which gray hairs and bigger noses are only the most visible signs.  Which, in my opinion, nails this growing old thing right where it hurts.  At the point of perception.

What we see in the mirror or when someone takes our picture and we are forced to see things from their angle of vision or when someone remarks, in one way or another, about how old we look to them can be frightening.  No trick and no treat.  In fact, I had one elderly woman just say it that way one time.  She said, "growing old is scary."  And, it's scary, in part, because of what we see taking place in the only body we'll ever have this side of death.  What we see is death creeping up on us, one gray hair or one wrinkle or one larger ear lobe at a time.  It was scary enough to the old man who wrote in the Psalm "even to my old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me."  (Psalm 71:18)

Which is only one of the reasons growing older is scary.  As babies we learn that, when we cry, someone comes running.  We are the center of someone's attention all the time.  We then spend the rest of our lives coming to the painful realization that we are rarely ever again the center of anyone's attention.  With each passing year it gets more and more difficult to get anyone's attention no matter how loudly we cry.  Which must be one reason the Psalmist cried,  "God, whatever happens, please don't leave alone."  And, isn't that why we really fear the nursing home?  Who can name a greater fear than that of outliving everyone who ever knew you?

I've seen that fear in more than one set of eyes around here.  Great saints of God die in this place and only a few people are at the funeral.  It's not that no one cares.  It's just that nearly everyone who knew them well enough to care has already died.  There's hardly anyone left to even go the funeral.  It's a frightening feeling to wonder, at the funeral of a great friend, if you will outlive everyone who ever cared enough to know your name or note your passing.  No wonder the words of a great hymn appeal more to us as we grow older.  "Change and decay in all around I see.   Oh, Thou who changest not, abide with me."

It's all scary, too, because of what we hear and see around us.  A world that so worships beauty and youth that, even more than three decades after her death, Marilyn Monroe's Happy-birthday-Mr. President evening gown gets auctioned for $1.26 million and beauty queens auction their ovarian eggs over the Internet so that anyone who can afford the price can guarantee themselves a shot at a beautiful baby even if nature left them beauty-challenged.  Someone might well ask what this world is coming to.  For the most part, however, it's what we know we are coming to that keeps us preoccupied.   Or, perhaps I should say, what it appears we are coming to.

So, here is both the gift and the challenge of faith.  Without faith in God and what He is up to in His work of redemption in Christ, we are left with nothing more than to live with the prospect of death and the constant reminders of its slow but steady encroachment on our ever-decreasing ability to keep it at bay.  Sadly, we sometimes even resort to resenting old age and even mocking it as though, by laughing at it or belittling it, we are somehow delaying the inevitable in our own lives.  Some people won't even walk into a nursing home to visit an older friend or relative because they actually are so afraid of their own eventual death they cannot stand to see or smell the evidence of what their future holds.

Faith in Christ, however, gifts us with more and challenges us to more than despair.   Paul's words, again, slightly rearranged, "Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day . . . so we do not lose heart . . . because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be see is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal."

Here is the simple meaning and the point of it.  If we can see it, or others can see it and tell us what they see, then it is in the process of decay.  It won't last.   So, learn to look at yourself and others through eyes other than the ones sitting on either side of the top part of your nose.  Only with the eyes of a heart filled with faith in Christ can you see what is, for now, invisible but, in time, permanent and eternal.

Walter and Nancy Counts took us out to Ft. Davis a few weeks ago and I had an experience I had not had in a longer time than I can remember.  I had almost forgotten, even though I grew up in West Texas, how clear the night sky can be where there is no city smog or light.  Early one morning when it was still so dark I could hardly see my bare feet beneath me, I took my telescope outside and pointed it toward what I had always thought was just a bright star rising with the moon in the eastern September sky.   What I was then able to see with the vision that only clear skies and enhanced vision could give was the shape of a planet we know of as Venus.  No longer just a blurred brightness but half-mooned and clear.  It is truly amazing what you can see when you have better vision and a clear view.  In fact, the night skies here in Dallas can look almost dead by comparison.  But, that is just the way things appear.   The same stars that can be seen from a front porch nestled in the Davis mountains ought to be visible from a backyard just off of I-30.  It's just that, from here, our vision is blurred and our eyes can't see as far because of all the stuff in the air.

Driving by the corner of Tenth and Zang what you see is a church building that looks like nothing anyone would build in this day and time.  As beautiful as this great church is to us, architectural trends have changed to accommodate what appeals to the modern eye.  To many, what is seen at this corner is old because it was built for another day and time.  It is only when you look with the clearer vision that only eyes of faith can give that you can see the new life being born here.  In time, even our buildings, those things that house the real church, remind us, in some ways, that "our outer nature is wasting away" but what we celebrate as we approach our hundredth birthday is that, for a real fact, "our inner nature is being renewed day by day."

And, you can see it at the nursing home, too.  And, at the hospital when you stand at the bedside of a dying friend, no matter what the age.  And, in the funeral chapel where the casket reminds you that the final work of "wasting away" has been accomplished in the life of someone whose name you knew and whose warm embrace you once cherished.  You can see it if you look for it and only if you have the eyes that faith in an eternal God can give you.  A faith that clears the smog of fear and sharpens your focus beyond what you might naturally see.  What is seen, and therefore temporary, is passing away so that what is otherwise invisible and yet eternal may come into sharper focus.  You can see it if you look for it.  A transformation is taking place.

When you think about it, it's truly amazing what you can accomplish in life without faith in God.  We went to the Duncanville football game the other night and observed the moment of silence that has replaced what was once the prayer before the game.  I'm not naïve enough to believe that everyone who played well in that game did so because they prayed when we were only supposed to be silent.  You can play and win a lot of games without trusting God for the outcome.  Even Albert Einstein mocked faith as a useless exercise and yet was able to make contributions to human knowledge that brilliance still ponders.  You can do a great deal without faith in God.  But, one thing you cannot do is see beyond what is dying to what outlives death forever.  And, most certainly, when the time comes, you can't go from life to death and back to life again without faith in Him.  The smog of sin's death will choke all hope out of that journey.

But, with faith in Christ, you can actually come to the place where you not only stop dreading death, you start celebrating that dying is what leads to living.  Celebrating the transformation that takes place only when what is visible is replaced by what is invisible.

Steve Blow recently mocked the way Americans spend $4 billion per year buying, at what measures out to $3 to $4 per gallon, what comes cheaply out the facet in kitchen.  His argument is that, no matter what you are willing to pay for a bottle of water with a fancy label on the outside, what is on the inside is still just water and sometimes not as good as what comes out of the tap.  ("Bottled water craze is hard to swallow," Dallas Morning News, October 24, 1999, 35A)  Conversely, no matter how much we may resent the way our package decays beyond our control and no matter how much we may be willing to spend to make it look better, it is that is on the inside that is of lasting value.  Christ is making us new.  It may look like we are only dying.  What is really going on is that we are actually be transformed into something more new and alive than any baby ever born to a mother.  Ultimately, our bodies are nothing more than the dying womb of our eternal souls.

That's why we sing as we go and celebrate even as we grieve.  We know, don't we, what is really going on here.  It is what causes us to look into the face of the One who lived and died and rose again and sing as a prayer over and over and over again the words of Charles Wesley's great hymn that we sang a moment ago.  "Finish then, thy new creation; Pure and spotless let us be; Let us see Thy great salvation perfectly restored in Thee:  Changed from glory into glory, Till in heaven we take our place, Till we cast our crowns before Thee, Lost in wonder, love and praise."

And, all those who really see, said, "Amen."