Still Green

Thirty years ago Jan and I started a church newsletter in our first pastoral charge in Gaspe. We called it, The Evergreen. That came from a verse in Psalm 92.

“Still bearing fruit in old age, still full of sap, still green, they proclaim your constancy.”

Thirty years later, I have a greater appreciation for what the aging process does to us.

I am conscious of the reality of slowing down and feeling the aches. I have joined the group that think about physical and mental decline.

But here is some good news! The most recent Smithsonian Magazine tells us that one recent study reported that despite losses in short-term memory and visual spatial processing, older air traffic controllers maintained a high level of expertise because they were so proficient in navigating, juggling multiple aircraft and avoiding collisions.

Another study showed that when giving advice in “Dear Abby” letters, adults 60 years and older did a better job in dealing with social conflicts. Compared to younger subjects, these older adults were better able to imagine different points of view, consider multiple resolutions and suggest compromises.

I could go on but it might be too depressing for the under 60s.

Apparently the psalmist’s words were not just wishful thinking. The golden years may also be green years.

Bethsaida - Connected Through Time

For a week in May, the rocky ruins of Bethsaida in Galilee was home to a group of seventeen volunteer archaeologists. Or maybe we were just movers of sand and rock. But now and then a little treasure would emerge from the sand or from the sifters and we felt like so much more than labourers.

We tried to picture the town in its various stages of history,

     - a vibrant city at the time of David with walls between 20 and 30 feet thick.

     - a smoky ruin 260 years later when the empire of the day, the Assyrians, tore it down. We handled the grain that was burned in that conflagration.

     - a little fishing village in the time of Jesus when he came here to find several of his disciples.

     - Here according to the Talmud, 300 different kinds of fish were served in the same dish. Must have been a bigger dish than we found.

This is a place where one little shard from a 3000 year old pot or a silver earring from the first century invites the imagination to run wild. Who wore this? How was it lost? How long did she search for it?

We touched broken and lost artifacts that were once part of the daily life of people like us. Their stories are lost to us but we were here because one set of stories was told and retold until they reached us, stories of a man strong in spirit and in love who changed our world and changed us.