My wife and I recently went to visit my 88-year-old mom in North Carolina. She lives alone in the house where she spent part of her childhood. The house is about two miles outside of the small town of Wagram. Mom still drives and actually is in pretty good health. She would prefer to stay right where she is for as long as she can. She actually feels pretty safe with her 4 dogs running around in the yard and neighbors that keep a regular check on her. The issue is she knows and we know that at any moment that could change. I am beginning to realize that this is true regardless of our age. I have an aunt who is much younger who just discovered she has Alzheimer’s. A few weeks ago she was planning on moving nearer the grandchildren so she could spend time with them. Now she is looking into nursing homes. What is the commercial that was running a few years ago, "Life comes at you fast!"

Lately it seems to me that the most important issue for all of us is how we keep all this in perspective. My sense is that this is one of the main reasons God has given us the scriptures. On Sunday June 27 we will finish our series of sermons on the book of Revelation. This is a book that takes both the power of evil and the goodness of God very seriously. It seeks to give us a sense of perspective on life.

Barbara Brown Taylor in her book Leaving Church tells the following story. She shares her concern that it seems to her that we think that since Jesus took care of all the hard work for us there is really nothing left for us to do. "God now has become a great friend who would like to get to know us all better, if we can find the time. And if we cannot, then God loves us anyway. "The fear of the Lord" has become as outdated as an ephod."

"This is not true for the Native Americans I know, whose divine meetings have included glimpses of the god who is as far above them on the food chair as an eagle is to a mouse. When they will talk about this at all, they do not speak like mice whose bones have been picked clean. They speak like mice who have been lifted high into the heavens where they have seen themselves, the world, and the lives they lead with terrible new clarity. Set down again, they cannot look at anything the same way they once did, which means that they cannot live the same way either. Because their fear has proved to be the means of their transformation, they do not want to get over it. Their time aloft has brought them as close to an eagle as most of them will ever get, which makes their terror appropriate. The fear of the Lord and the Lord’s love of them are two windows on the same reality." P. 189-190.

There is something terrifyingly real about dealing with aging parents that you love—as someone said, "No one gets out of this world alive!" So please let us not be guilty of trivializing the agonizing that is involved in all these hard choices. But is it just possible that Taylor is right and the fear of the Lord and the Lord’s love are two views of the same reality? This would mean that indeed even in these hard choices we are transformed into persons that are being moved more toward the image of God by the very making of them. John