"I finally ended up telling him to take me home Saturday. I couldn't stand the thought of staying with him one more night." So said a sweet little old lady of my acquaintance. She referred to her son, who had picked her up last Wednesday for the Thanksgiving holiday. On the drive back downstate she heard a funny noise in the engine. She correctly diagnosed it as a worn timing belt. She knew because her car had needed a new belt last summer and she remembered the distinctive sound. When she warned him he ignored her. How could she possibly know more about cars than he? She's just a woman, after all, and an old one, and his mom for crying out loud.
On Friday the timing belt broke while he drove to pick up a bottle of whiskey. She had warned him about that, too.
As we age almost all of us wish younger people would listen to us. Of course we wish everybody would listen to us all the time, but I mean something very particular here. Occasionally we know a thing so important it burns within us. We long to get it across to people we love before they make an avoidable mistake. Possibly we've made that same mistake. Regardless, we see the train wreck coming, they don't, and we want to save them from the pain.
But most people's default position is not listening. I admit it myself. I rarely ask for advice. When offered it, I usually resent it that anybody could possibly imagine I had not already thought of everything. Whether I have or not does not matter; making people believe I have is the thing.
Here is a short list of mistakes I could have missed making had I listened to wiser, older people:
1. Dating a girl who had no faith in God--and no intention of getting any.
2. Temporarily breaking up with the girl I would eventually marry.
3. Accepting my first calling as a minister to work in an upscale community with values and economic habits with which I deeply disagreed.
4. Failing to give my own mother the full measure of respect she deserved until after my father's death and her battle with cancer.
5. Allowing my relationship with one of my brothers to become so strained it appears impossible to reconcile it.
Here is a short list of lessons I have learned from listening to the ladies at the Village at Bay Ridge, the retirement community where I lead worship each Tuesday:
1. Life includes pain. God allows the pain for reasons we cannot know. Deal with it.
2. Younger people--including our own children--often do not listen to us. Patience really is a virtue.
3. Even hymns I consider musically horrid can give people a powerful spiritual boost.
4. Real wisdom has a way of cutting through all the crap if you gently but persistently speak the truth.
5. Dignity comes from staying true to your beliefs come what may.
Listen. Somebody may be trying to keep you from crossing just as the locomotive speeds through.
