WISDOM FOR A NEW YEAR

Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better person.—Benjamin Franklin

As another new year dawns (I write this on Dec. 22) I find myself in search of something special to say to my readers, something from the wisdom of the ages. The new year of 1991 is special in that it is really the beginning of the last decade of the century in which we were all born. The year 1990 may have been the beginning of the 1990s but it was really the last year of the ninth decade.

That means the 20th century will not end until the last day of the tenth decade, the year 2000, not 1999. So, when our dear brother Norvel Young invites all of us to join him in Firestone Fieldhouse at Pepperdine University at 7 p.m. on Jan 1, 2000 to celebrate the beginning of a new millennium, he is jumping the gun on the calendar. He is a year early; the party should be on Jan. 1, 2001! But that’s OK, for Norvel has always been a step ahead of the rest of us. The Lord willing, I will be there to celebrate the new millennium with him—a year early!

Well, now that we have that settled we can talk about wisdom for the new year and the new decade. I said this is the century in which we were all born. I should have said nearly all of us, for there is a dear old lady living with us who was born in 1896, whom I named “Mother Pitts” 46 years ago. When I stepped into her room on a recent morning and saw her asleep in her lift chair, now decimated by old age, I thought about the stories I had heard about how beautiful she was in her youth. Ouida says her mother was so beautiful that it was a problem to her. Men and women alike would stare. I first met her when she was half her present age. She was still stunningly beautiful at 47. You can understand that I was eager to meet her daughter who was away at college! But from the first day I met Mother Pitts it was her inward grace that impressed me even more than her outward beauty.

I lingered in her room that morning, just the two of us, thinking about how “our years pass like a sigh,” as a psalm puts it. Her hair, now silky white, has thinned some. Once the ideal height for a woman (just like Ouida!) she is now at least a full foot shorter, and her back is bowed so much that she shuffles with a stoop, bent over as if she were looking for something on the floor. And she shuffles along in the few feet of her confined world only with help. Like a baby she sleeps most of the time, and like a baby she wears diapers and is syringe fed. And she is confused; usually she knows who we are but sometimes she doesn’t.

Sometimes it is amusing. I still joke with her as I always have. One evening as we were tucking her into bed I asked her if she knew who we were. She did, calling us by name. I asked her if she knew Ouida and I were married, reminding her, that after all it was partly her fault! “No, I had no idea that you were married,” she said. But in a moment she added with a twinkle in her eye, “But I’m not surprised.”

The Mother Pitts that I’ve known most of my life is of course gone, but not altogether. Not only are there traces of her once natural beauty but her inward grace is still intact. She never complains. She still says thank you, and in her desperate helplessness, which she senses, she expresses appreciation that we are with her. She assures us that she is not afraid, and when we pray with her she often says something like “That was a beautiful prayer.” When I say “You know we love you, don’t you?,” she says, “Yes, if I didn’t I’d just keel over.” I can understand why Ouida doesn’t want her in a nursing home.

There is something about Mother Pitts that is the wisdom I am looking for, and it is best expressed by simplicity of life. I am not sure what the reformer John Huss meant when, while dying at the stake, he cried out his last words, “O holy simplicity!,” but it may have been akin to what I see in Mother Pitts’ life. The simple life—simple faith, simple virtues, simple wants, simple manners, simple dress—is the life of wisdom. It may have been Jesus Christ that Huss was referring to as holy simplicity, for his life was great because it was simple and simple because it was great. Longfellow said it well when he wrote, “In character, in manners, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.”

I had not thought of Jesus teaching a science of goodness until I read these words from the poet Schiller, “A childlike mind, in its simplicity, practices that science of good to which the wise may be blind.” Jesus was teaching the essence of his own life when he said, “The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is single, your whole body will be full of light” (Mt. 6:22). The eye probably refers to the mind and soul, to all that one is inwardly—his or her character, attitude, desires, motives. If these be good or single—I would say simple—then one is right-minded and full oflight. To be the opposite of this, to be filled with darkness, is to be self-deceived, dishonest, insincere. The simple life has no ax to grind, no point to prove, plays no games, and is not phoney. It is content to seek first the kingdom of God and leave the results to God.

Jesus laid down a simple and yet a profound rule for one who is pleased to live an unassuming life: “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble” (Mt. 6:34). It took one immersed in the wisdom of God as was Jesus to come up with such a life-changing maxim: Each day has troubles enough, so don’t borrow troubles from tomorrow.

Mother Pitts lived by that rule. While life was already difficult enough for her, it became more trying when she was widowed with still part of her family to raise. She lived in day-tight compartments, taking the days one at a time and looking to God to sustain her one day at a time. He never failed her; she never failed him. Even though life was a struggle for her, she always had time and the resources to help others.

That is the wisdom for the living of 1991 and this century’s last decade, the simple life lived in simple trusting faith.

I’ve looked for aphorisms that express that wisdom in other ways, such as this one from old Ben Franklin, who had a way of saying things in a down-home kind of way: “Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better person.” There is enough wisdom and courage in those words for the facing of this hour and the living of these days.

We have only one war to wage, with ourselves in the struggle against sinful pride. We wage peace with our neighbors by being peacemakers, not just peace lovers, and that includes the church. And we should always be improving ourselves, thus preparing ourselves by God’s grace for another world in God’s tomorrow.

A better person in 1991 than in 1990, and all for the glory of God! The wisdom for the coming year is just that simple. But in closing I include one of my favorites from the great preacher Charles Spurgeon: “There are no crown wearers in heaven that were not cross bearers here below.”

It is cross bearers that become crown wearers! There is enough wisdom in that one to spill over into the next century.—the Editor