WHEN GOD HOLDS MY HAND......

I have just recently become older than I was exactly a year ago and, since I began to write this, I have even become older than I was when I awoke this morning. At my current age, I no longer accept the usual comment that "age is just a number".  Now I do not think of such a comment as fact but as consolation. If age was nothing more than a number, why do I now wake up sometimes to unexplained physical aches that I did not experience in the first five decades of my life? Why do people tell me that I don't look my age when they didn't say that to me 40 or even 30 years ago?  If age is just a number, why is it that I can no longer run as fast or jump as high as I did when I was a teenager?  Why then has proximity to the grave become much more real and closer to me than it ever did?  Why do I feel that I have so much to accomplish with so little time to do so?  Why is it now a stamp in my consciousness that at any time now the bell will toll for me? If age is just a number, why have I become more conscious of the fact that this is now legacy time for me when that was never in my thoughts previously?  Why is God teaching me things that He probably didn't think I needed to learn until now?  Please stop telling me that age is just a number because, to me, it isn't.

I know that my day of reckoning is closer now than it ever was and, although I know that I will not be the one to set the agenda for our conversation when I meet God face-to-face, I am thinking of the questions what I would like to discuss with Him when He holds my hand and welcomes me to heaven.  The more I think of my dream meeting with God, the more questions I have and the fewer the answers I have to situations that I had  long thought I was knowledgeable about.  Clearly, as I get older, I am not only thinking of my mortality but I am also looking at things differently and realizing how much I really desire to know about life and the world in which I have lived for as many decades as I now have.

If God grants me the opportunity, I would thank and then ask Him why he chose me for the blessings that he bestowed on me when I lived in this world. The truth is that if God had ever given me a pen and paper and asked me to script the life that I wanted to live when I was born, there is absolutely no way that I could have scripted it the way it came out.  I could never have even dreamed of the quantity and nature of blessings and miracles that God chose to pour into my life.  Certainly, this is not the life that I envisaged as a young man and it is only by favor greater than my human intellect and hard work that I am who and what I am.

I would ask God why He took my mother when I was only nine (and my youngest sister was only three years old) and why He took my father just shy of twenty years later - just as my youngest sister was writing her final examination as an undergraduate.  Then I would ask Him why He chose not to let my siblings and me drift as nomads and why He paved the way for us to become successful individuals. I would ask Him if He did that to fulfill His word that the children of the righteous would never beg for bread.

I would ask God why He felt that I deserved to be alive to see the first non-white person assume the high office of the President of the United States. Then I would thank Him for making it such that I was not only alive for that but was also here to see my children grow up and vote for a US President that looked like them.  Perhaps by the time I am having this conversation, I would also be able to thank Him for the opportunity to see a woman as President of the United States.

I would ask God why He made some people white and others black; why He made some gay and others straight; and why He allowed some to be rich and others poor.  I would ask Him if that was to test the ability of man to love others as much as God loves mankind.  I would report to Him that so many in the world that I just left have been hated and harmed by others just for being how God made them, and I would ask God if the hate in this world should ever be expected to end. I would beg God to raise people that would lead efforts to promote love in their communities because too many people who claim to be religious in the world are pushers of hate and violence against those who don't share their race/ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, gender, class, religious affiliation and/or political identity.  I would ask God why human beings believe that they must judge others over who and what they are when He who is the maker of us all has not judged His children but has instead said: "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy".

Finally, I would request God to keep His wall of protection around the family that I left behind on earth when He brought me to join Him in heaven.  I would ask Him to keep my children very close to Him every moment of their lives, to continue to reveal Himself to them according to His will and to maintain permanence in their hearts and lives because I desire to see them in heaven when they have lived their full lives here on earth.