Sunday Morning Meds--Forever

 

“the Lord is enthroned as King forever” Psalm 29:10

Yesterday, in an airport, a friend of mine and I were charmed by the members of a high school choir returning from a tour in San Francisco, where they’d sung at a number of places, ate fortune cookies and sourdough bread, and did, they said, all kinds of other fun things. Coming home, those kids were both tired and pumped, as only high school kids can be.

And they were remarkably talkative. We asked some young women if the whole bunch had behaved. They said yes, except for some boys—“but you know how guys are.” We asked them if there were any tour romances. Only one.

“Maybe that’s okay,” I quipped. “After all, it’s probably good not too many of you left your hearts in San Francisco.”

They half-smiled at the old guy. Okay, it wasn’t a line that would land me a job writing comedy, but I was trying to be catchy. Trying. At that moment, my friend, a guy half my age, looked at me and winced. “I don’t think they got that one,” he said.

I felt like donating myself to a museum.

Once I reach, say, 69 instead of 59, I’ll be better adjusted to the thud my jokes create. It never dawned on me that those kids might not know a song I thought imprinted on the American psyche. I simply assumed we shared a world. We don’t.

I remember exactly the last time I played basketball. I was pushing thirty. That night, I took a pass from a guard, came across the lane as pumped as those high school kids, and jumped up off my left foot to take a kind of baby hook. But something strange happened. My body, like a sandbag, didn’t respond. My mind had me swooping through the air. My body had no notion of the same, and I never stepped on the court again.

That’s the way I felt yesterday at the gate. The quip never got off the ground, even though it never dawned on me that I wouldn’t score.

Finiteness is something I’m coming to understand far better as I get older. I know it physically, and have for a long time. I know it mentally: words don’t come as easily. I know it culturally: my jokes are starting to land as flat as my grandfather’s. I know it generationally: my college students say things I simply don’t understand, the way my own parents once didn’t understand me.

I don’t have the power to bend my mind around the word “forever.” But I know what David aims to tell us in this verse: that God’s knees don’t buckle. He doesn’t forget where he parked his car and hasn’t nodded off when he shouldn’t have.

He was—and he is—King of creation. He is infinite. He is forever.

Last night that high school choir offered a couple hundred fellow passengers something of their estimable repertoire as we sat on the tarmac and waited for a thundershower to pass, as God almighty held us in his hands, as he has, and does, and will.

The Lord is enthroned as King forever. His kingdom was, and is, and forever shall be—world without end. Without fade, without end, and no bad jokes.

That’s a place to leave your heart. Not to be forgotten, ever, in sunshine or rain.