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Awaiting a Better Day
4 And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. Rev. 21:4
On Tuesday mornings a mostly elderly group of Berean men gather to have breakfast. This has been occurring for decades. We seem to get on well and I think that it may be generally said of us that we are well-behaved. To our credit, it should be noted that the police have never been called.
Our average age varies based on those in attendance, but I think that it is fair to say that it is in the seventies most of the time. As the great nineteenth-century short story writer O’Henry was wont to exclaim, we are men who have “seen the elephant and heard the owl”. In other words, we have been around. We are aware that things have changed over the years, and we are mostly unhappy about it. The government, the media, world affairs, men’s and women’s fashions, young people and Detroit sports teams are all, in our estimation, in steep decline. We deem that most of the days that we have seen were better than the ones we are currently experiencing.
I don’t know that we have ever had a man just drop out of our group, but we have experienced some to “move on”. We are “older” men, so the “moving” thing may be understood in multiple ways: Though this has yet to occur, one of our members may awake one morning to discover that he is not quite sure who he is. In that instance, family or some government entity, may scoop them up and tuck them into a new location in the interest of their well-being and the public’s safety. Others, obviously under some still deeper delusion, may believe that there are better places to await the end than metro Detroit. These men are wont to call a moving van.
Even in our tight little group of mature Bible-believing, theologically strong, Baptist men, there is, sadly, a third group of “movers”. These are those fallen at the hands of the reaper. We love them! We mourn them! We miss them terribly!
We are aged men, and the pattern of loss is familiar to us. We have let go of much in our long lives. People and things have been released back to the dust. This verse, then, brings special comfort to old souls. One bright eternal morning, God Himself will wipe the tears from our eyes. On the other side of that threshold, we will never again say goodbye, never again stand a mournful watch through the long night, never again grieve over an empty place. These sorrows have an end. Through Christ, we shall outlive them!
George Moore
Elder Emeritus
