Last year I had the privilege to meet and speak with a man in the final days of his earthly life. While going to his house to visit him I noticed a plaque on his wall that read, “We grow too soon old, and too late wise.” How true a statement that proverb is!
I would love to have clearer answers to the situations and problems that many of us face in life. I long to know precisely what good God is bringing about when conflict and physical trials afflict us. These situations are all around us, never seeming to end. As a matter of fact many of them seem to just get bigger and bigger the longer we live. “We grow too soon old, and to late wise.”
There is truth in that statement, and yet there is also myth. Has God given us enormous things to do in our lives? Yes! He has given us the care and stewardship of His creation; the filling of it through the propagation of children; the privilege of raising and discipling them in the fear and admonition of the Lord; the call of the Gospel message and the Great Commission. All of these tasks have been given to us. While there may be uncertainty in these things about what we should or should not do with them, there is not complete ignorance about them. We may not have every answer we want to the questions of life, but we do have all the answers we truly need to make sense of them. Why is there death? Why is there sickness? Why is there hostility? It is there because of sin. “WELL, THAT’S NOT THE ANSWER I WANT, GOD!” Nevertheless, that is the answer we need to hear.
If you can look at the sufferings of this world around your life and see that the “wages of sin is death” we are not as dumb as we think. Yet when we look at those same situations and thumb our nose at God, in essence saying, “I know better than you do,” we have failed to miss the most basic message of the entire totality of Holy Scripture. He is God, and we are not.
“We grow too soon old, and too late wise.”
May you know not every answer, but the one that matters most and then grow both old and wise in Him.