During a recent whirlwind trip to London, I set out one afternoon to show a teenaged niece and nephew how to flit around the big city on the famous Tube.
The train that whisked into Oxford Station was crowded. In the end of one of the subway cars we spotted three seats and bolted for them. But a Londoner, probably in his late 30’s, boarded the car from the mid-section doors and made a beeline toward the same seat I had targeted. We got there in a dead heat.
The fellow looked weary, like he had worked a long, hard day and was ready to crash during the ride home. So I smiled and gestured for him to take the seat.
He took one look at my white hair, and being a decent chap, was visibly revolted at the idea of making an old man stand up while he sat down. He recoiled from the seat like it had shocked him and insisted almost violently that I occupy the one open seat.
The whole scene first shocked me, and then amused me. My hair indeed is white and I am looking backwards at 60, but I seldom think of myself as an old man.
My mother’s favorite rebuke when I pulled an 8-year-old stunt was, “You need to act your age.” She really meant, “Why don’t you act like you’re 28?”
I never have been very good at acting my age. When I was a kid, I acted too much like an old man. Now that I’m getting to be an old man, I keep wanting to act like a kid. Either that’s normal, or it’s genetic.
Shortly before his death, my 86-year-old father came to visit us. “Dad,” I asked him during a relaxed late-evening chat, “in your mind’s eye—when you picture yourself—how old are you?”
For a moment he pondered my question. Then he smiled, “About 18.” Three months later he died.
So I’ve about given up trying to act my age physically. Far more important for all of us is learning to act our spiritual age.
The Bible challenges all of us to “grow up into Christ.” All who are “born again” start off as spiritual infants who need baby food. Both biologically and spiritually, however, childhood should be a temporary phase. The apostle Paul said he exerted every iota of energy the Lord gave him to nurture his converts to maturity in Christ. And just like my mother, he kept reminding them to act their age.