Whether The Apocalypse Is At Hand (Or Not), Choose To Love Others And Live With Joy
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(OPINION) Every March, I pause and take stock of the year I’ve just come through, where I am now, what might lie ahead and how I feel about all of it — the past, the present and the future.
This is my birthday month. I’m turning 69, which puts me on the cusp of the ominous 7-0.
Every year, when I write my birthday column, I get emails from readers telling me to buck up, that they’re 95 and still running marathons backwards and I’m a whiny pup. Why, I’m practically a teenager!
So, let me acknowledge up front that I’m lucky to be any age — life is a gift. And 69 or even 70 ain’t ancient. I’m able to get around fine under my own power. I’ve still got my mind (more or less). I’ve got a wife and family I love. I’m remarkably blessed, I know.
Yeah, age is just a number. But these aren’t auspicious numbers. I’d rather be 29 or 39 than 69. Can I say that, at least? I really enjoyed my youth, and I’d like to have a big chunk of it back. Sir, may I have some more, please?
Anyway, as I take stock this year, I feel a foreboding of apocalypse. Maybe my own apocalypse, or maybe this country’s, or maybe the world’s.
I think of Yeats’ “The Second Coming”:
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
I could be wrong. As I age, I sometimes see apocalypses pending even where they aren’t.
Recently, I had a medical issue. It wasn’t an emergency — I wasn’t spurting blood — and I had to wait a couple of weeks to see the doctor.
Meanwhile, I doom scrolled the internet, trying to diagnose myself. By the time my appointment arrived, I was 90% sure I was in the final stages of an incurable illness.
My doctor listened to a recitation of my symptoms, nodded, gave me a careful going over, then assured me my problem amounted to, well, nothing abnormal for a guy my age.
When I got home from his office my symptoms had vanished. Grab the radio and shout hallelujah! I was healed!
So, in addition to everything else, age seems to be turning me into a hypochondriac, something I’ve never been before.
Still, even allowing for such neurosis, I think we do seem to be in the midst of some major shift in the cosmos.
There’s a dangerous war in Ukraine, an even more dangerous one in the Middle East and everything but war with China. The balance of power inside the United States has been flipped on its head, and nobody knows where that’s going or how it will end. Not well, is my guess.
AI is reading our minds. The next pandemic lurks silently in some petri dish or chicken coop. The stock market is dropping like a stone. Wildfires are burning wildly. Plus, I’m another year older, and my hip hurts, and I have to get up twice at night to pee.
Things are falling apart. The center cannot hold.
Maybe you feel the same way. If so, here’s the upside.
You can choose to think of all this bad news as great news, in a counterintuitive way. If the world is spiraling out of control, you don’t have to control it anymore, do you? You’re scot free. You can ease away from the craziness and find a radical, rebellious delight right now.
Despite my neurotic -isms and -itises, that’s what I’m trying — with mixed success — to do.
None of us knows the future. I may be running marathons backwards when I’m 95, or I may drop dead before this week is out. The United States may rise to unprecedented glory in the coming years, or it may collapse in a smoldering heap. The stock market might rebound, or it might freefall into a worldwide depression and take my health care with it.
Sure, there are little things I can do to perhaps mitigate the damage, and I’ll do those.
Mainly, though, the future will bring what it brings. There are spiritual forces beyond our control at work here.
What each of us does control is how we face the moment in front of us right now. And right now, we’re probably doing OK.
Why not milk that? Why not eat at your favorite restaurant or take your grandkids shopping or watch “White Lotus” with your wife? Sleep in whenever you feel like it and wake up praising the Lord. Go out of your way to help others. Practice kindness and sow joy.
Samuel Johnson said of a literary friend who had accomplished the best writing of his career while under a death sentence, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
What I know at 69 is that whether it’s in a fortnight or in 20 years, whether it’s as individuals or a plague takes us out by the millions, we’re all facing the gallows. Nobody gets out of here alive. Instead of letting that inescapable fate drive us to despair, bitterness or terror, we can let it concentrate our minds wonderfully, every God-breathed moment along the way.
The destination might be the same, but the journey will be immeasurably sweeter.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.