My argument for this post is plain: I find that the older a person gets, the more comfy they want their life to be. Risk is averted, adventure is spurned, and daily challenges lose interest. I believe this is true for nations too, and it is becoming clearer to me everyday that America is more than ready to be fitted for a new set of dentures and room with a view at the cushy retirement home.

Getting old is a bummer, and I know this more than ever now that I have cleared the dreaded mountain peak of 50 years of age.  I have crossed over to the downhill slope of life rolling fast to the bottom and gaining speed by the year. Gravity’s pull is relentless. I feel lethargy tugging at every pore of my body. I love soft chairs, warm coffee and a good book. I would rather not run if I don’t have to, and just walking up the driveway to get the mail has me concerned I might pull a calf muscle.

It wasn’t always this way. 

Growing up as a kid I looked forward to each new day, ready to explore and experience, to run and push the limits on my physical abilities. I also had an active sister who would not let me sit. “Get out of the house, you slug,” she would say. So after I slurped down a bowl of Frosted Flakes, we would lace up our converse tennis shoes and then set out on an early adventure with our dog hiking through woods, throwing rocks in Lake Erie, making forts in the back yard. Some days we wouldn’t come back inside the house until dinner time at 6:00 p.m.

Even in college, if my buddies and I had a few free days off, we couldn’t sit still. Our favorite past time was to go on long road trips together just for the fun of it. I remember one drive in particular, two of my friends and I took my 1977 Buick Skyhawk – a rattling scrap heap of metal – and we drove over the mountains of Kentucky and North Carolina on the way to go visit Myrtle Beach.  We didn’t pack a thing, just jumped in the car, filled up the tank with gas, and drove. It was an eleven-hour drive to the ocean, and all I had in the glove compartment to listen to was a single cassette tape of the Steve Miller Band, Book of Dreams. I think we listened to it 200 hundred times on that trip, “Fly like an Eagle…” I will never forget the feeling of freedom and adventure when we finally reached the sandy shores of the Atlantic Ocean at 6:00 a.m. and slept for most of the day in the hot sun. And then after a few hours of swimming, we hopped back into the car and drove back. 

Crazy, I know, but boy was it exhilarating. The conversations and the singing and stopping at gas stations for a Twinkie and junk food, and just watching the lazy countryside slip past us was worth it all. I will never forget it!

But don’t ask me to do that now. With my older and more conventional mind, I view myself as an important person and I have way too much responsibility to be so care-free. Secretly, I also harbor a constant gnawing fear of having my car break down in the mountains or being caught in a 60 car pile-up just around the next bend in the road. And in all honesty, in order to go on such a long trip my wife would require us to pack our car with two weeks of supplies just in case we were stranded -along with three days of movies for the kids to watch so they wouldn’t complain. 

So instead of putting up with the hassle; sitting and sipping coffee in my living room on a comfy couch sounds so much…how can I say it…easier than taking an unplanned reckless adventure. 

Meanwhile, in my ease, I am shrinking inside. I can feel it. It is like I am waiting around for something to happen to me. As if I am stuck in an airplane terminal waiting for my final departure flight. But what am I waiting for? Retirement (whatever that means)? Death? 

What kind of a life is that? Sitting, waiting, complaining. But hey, at least I am still alive. Right?

I am reading a book about the early Christian settlers of the United States, and it says how they were daily aware of the “transitoriness of life.” They saw it “with all its richness, as essentially the gymnasium and dressing-room where a person is preparing himself for heaven, to regard readiness to die as the first step in learning to live.”

Did you catch that? Readiness to die is the first step in learning to live. All we want to do these days is avoid death and as a result no one knows how to live anymore. America has grown old. 

Instead of risk, cowardice has taken over our hearts because we only want to be taken care of. Instead of giving a person the freedom to make foolish decisions, like driving a broken down Buick to Myrtle Beach, we must guarantee that everyone will be well taken care of. We must not let anyone think or consider they might die, but it our responsibility to now reassure them that we have waiting for them safety net after safety net after safety net to stop them from ever being hurt. It is our right, as many politicians tell us, to be taken care of. We are no longer responsible for our actions, the all-knowing Federal Government is to be our savior, they must keep us alive.

Because of this popular and accepted expectation, to meet the demands of those we deem dependent, which has become the unspoken belief for most of us, none of us really knows how to live anymore.

When I was a kid I came close to dying a number of times. I was on a sailboat stuck in the middle of Lake Erie during a massive thunderstorm, thirty foot waves crested around our helpless vessel, and I’m still here. My wife and I took a leap of faith to teach the Bible to Russians in Russia a few years after it opened up to the outside world. I will never forget the machine gun toting guards in the Moscow Airport that greeted us with cold stares, or the anxiety I felt when my wife came down with the debilitating Russian flu for two weeks; and yet, here I am. Or the joy I felt when I played Rugby at college and had more concussions than I care to admit. 

I will never give those experiences up, they made me who I am today, especially knowing that some people will be in heaven because I shared the Gospel in Russian schools even though some people here in comfy America warned me not to do it because Russia was still an unknown quantity. I long for the spirit of adventure I used to have. To throw caution to the wind and live for the moment, to impact a soul even at risk to myself in the process. But I am afraid I have grown old. And that is my concern about the vast majority of Americans. We no longer have the spirit of our fore founders. 

Listen to this quote from the book “A Quest for Godliness”:

“The Puritans experienced systematic persecution for their faith; what we today think of as the comforts of home were unknown to them; their medicine and surgery were rudimentary; they had no aspirins, tranquilizers, sleeping tablets or anti-depressant pills, just as they had no social security or insurance; in a world in which more than half the adult population died young and more than half the children born died in infancy, disease, distress, discomfort, pain and death were their constant companions. They would have been lost had they not kept their eyes on heaven and known themselves as pilgrims traveling home to the Celestial City.” 

The quote continues by saying the result of their early hardships gave them “extraordinary vivacity and hilarity”, but it also gave them, “in one word, maturity. Maturity is a compound of wisdom, goodwill, resilience and creativity. The Puritans exemplified maturity; we don’t. We are spiritual dwarfs.” 

I would argue that not only are we spiritual dwarfs, but we have simply grown old. We totter around like old people in a nursing home. We don’t want the hassle anymore, we want the couch. We don’t want the risks that go with the rewards; instead we look to government to care for us like an old man with bad legs who leans on the stout nurses to hold him up.

We have forgotten that life is not about staying alive, it is about living. COVID19 has called our bluff and most of us have folded. And I think we are poorer for it. Speaking about the heart of the Puritans, John Geree writes in 1646 on The Character of an Old English Puritane or Nonconformist, “His whole life he accounted a warfare, wherein Christ was his captain, his arms, prayers and tears. The Crosse his Banner and his motto Vincit qui patitur (he who suffers conquers).”

I am not sure we believe that anymore. The new motto of America is more like Securus agit (easy does it). And to me, that is no way to live, but rather it is the posture of someone who is waiting. Waiting for the final departure flight…destination death.

So I figure, if you are going to die anyway, you might as well try to live a little doing it.