A child teeters a bit on the new bicycle needing a thoughtful person to clear the way ahead of him or her as this balance is different from the former three wheel support. A skiier tries the new thing he or she has learned in the first ski class with an intake of breath at his or her own daring, expecting some sort of empathy from people standing on the side lines. A twelve-year-old steers the motor boat for the first time and speeds it up beyond his yet to be learned control, with the jerking weaving rowboat coming toward him being inexpertly rowed by its new young owner. The fish is too big and its flops too strong for the success of the shiny new rod and reel in the hands of its new owner trying to pose as an expert. Awkward hands try to form rolls from the dough attempting to make the simplelooking twists for the first time. Novices in every area of possible skill to human beings whether in creativity, recreation, farming, or science labs, snow bound hunting and fishing, or city production, are to be seen everywhere. Novices of every age, size, type, and personality surround us. We think we can recognize novices, and we know when we are ourselves the novice in some area that is brand new to us.
It has hit me recently, however, that there is an area in which we are all novices all the time, an area that we take for granted too often in other people, and also in ourselves. Age. What age are you? Have you ever been this age before? Does it seem strange to you that other people expect you to be this particular age, and take it for granted? I remember when my mother was sixy-three and I was a brand new mother of our first baby girl at twenty-three. I can still feel the acceptance by myself that sixty-three was a reasonable age for mother to be, but that it was astonishing that I was now a mother of twenty-three and expected to be all that a pastor’s wife, gardener, creative cook, Sunday school teacher, and a host of other things was expected to be at the advanced age of twenty-three. I had never been twenty-three before. Now as I feel the complete strangeness of being sixty-three and of having a forty-year-old daughter and a sixteen-year-old granddaughter, of having thirteen grandchildren of varying ages, all new ages now that 1978 is here, it occurs to me that everyone is a “novice” at being the age they are right now. We have put up new calendars. We have started our new engagement books, we have written ahead in our blank books the dates that are already fixed ahead for this year. Yet, 1978 has never been lived before by any of us, and the age we are now has never been our personal age before. Each new born baby is a novice at being a baby in your arms. Each toddler is a novice at being able to walk and to verbalize a few words or phrases. Each teen-ager is a novice at being a teen-ager, each person in their twenties has never been in the twenties before. The same thing must be said about every age in life, and for those whom one is apt to pass by as “just old people” whether walking along with canes, or sitting outside the old folks home, it is important to remember that they have never been old before. Each one is a novice at being that particular age. Hospitals are full of people who have never had a crippling accident before, who have never been paralyzed before, who have never had cancer before.
You and I are novices at living within the particular kind of situation we are living in right now, with the circumstances that will surround us in our personal lives in 1978 as well as in the world’s present moment of history. We are each one a “novice” at being the age we are this year, as we face the situations, circumstances, tragedies, joys, hardships, and happy surprises. We need to recognize that when we are tempted to shout “Act your age” to a child, or an older person. That person has never been that age before, nor have you or I ever been this age before. We should look at ourselves and everyone with new eyes, recognizing that it is not an easy transition for anyone to find one year more behind them. The expectation of everyone else presupposes a skill for “being” whatever is expected of this present number of years attached to us. We are all a bit wobbly on this new “bicycle” or “boat” or “tractor” or “plane” or “stilts,” which represent our new age, and which the on watchers are expecting us to demonstrate with some sort of skill.
We need each other’s understanding and compassion, and many others in our circle of family or friends need our understanding and compassion. Year by year we are novices. We have never been this age before, nor have we lived this combination of circumstances in the midst of this set of demands upon our brains, emotions, physical endurance, psychological makeup, experience, spiritual depth, faithfulness in prayer. This particular set of demands combined with this particular age we are has never been lived by any of us, nor any other person before. “But people have been every age before,” you may exclaim indignantly. Yes, but we walk a unique, diverse, significant way, made up of who we are as individuals, and the things required of us as individuals by a personal God, who treats us as persons. No one has ever walked our path before, at our age. This we must understand about each other in the plea for intercession, as well as in the plea for patience with one another. Paul speaks to us in First Thessalonians 5:14, to be patient to all, and in verse seventeen to pray without ceasing. We are to remember one another’s need of help, as well as to admonish each other to depend utterly upon the Lord. Verse twenty-four quiets our fears as we feel our inadequateness to “be our age,” as we are told, “Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it.” Our heavenly father knows we are novices, and has called not an imaginary person whom other people may think we are, but has called the real me and the real you, the novice. He is faithful to fulfill in us the work he has begun in us, and to do through us what he has asked us to do. But Paul goes on in verse twenty-five, with no canceling out of God’s promise to give what he needed in the help of all the Thessalonians and what each of us needs from each other, “Brethren pray for us.” He, Paul, had never walked that way before, nor have we.
