Transfiguration

This summer at camp we learned 1 Timothy 4:12 which says, “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believer in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity.”  I’ve been thinking lately that I wish there was another verse that said, “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are old, but set an example for the believer…”  In many ways, some of the older folks I’m watching are not setting a good example of what a believer should look like in the later stages of life.

In The Jesus Creed, Scot McKnight writes about Jesus’ transfiguration.  In the transfiguration Jesus reveals His glory to His disciples.  It is the glory that awaits Him when He returns to His rightful place in heaven.  But it is also the glory that awaits us …And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.  (2 Cor. 3:18)

McKnight makes the case that, as we mature in Christ and as we age physically, we should be experiencing transfiguration.  He gives the example of  Hyung  Goo, whose wife wrote about his battle with AIDS and eventual death from the disease.  She watched his body fade away, but his spirit was being transfigured before her eyes.

“Maybe that was what I was seeing when Hyung Goo looked at me and all I could see was love.  I was not succumbing to sentimental imagination.  I was living with an icon, with a person whose face had begun to shine like Moses’ did when he came down from the mountain.  [She adds…] Hyung Goo was more whole when he died than he had been at any other time in his life."

Andrew Peterson has a song I love along these same lines.  Part of the lyrics to “Queen of Iowa” goes like this:

            I met the queen of Iowa

She was dying on a couch in the suburbs

And with all of the things she was dying of

She was more alive than the others

Her majesty was all ablaze

She was burning hot but not consumed

            Our shoes removed in that holy place

In the hallowed ground of the living room

As I drove to Indiana this week to help some of my elderly relatives, I got to see some spectacular displays of color from the fall foliage.  Some of it just took my breath away.  And then the thought came to me…”The leaves are dying, and yet they are ablaze and full of glory.”  Recently I read a post from Donald Miller that said, “All the trees are losing their leaves, and not one of them is worried.” 

That’s what I want when I grow old:  to be ablaze with glory, so much that it takes someone’s breath away.  I don’t want to worry about the things I may be losing.  God has a plan.  He is in perfect control.

Proverbs 4:18 (MSG) says “The ways of right-living people glow with light; the longer they live, the brighter they shine.”  I am praying that I find some elderly who are like that.  And most of all I am praying that I might be one of them, when the time comes, that sets an example for others to follow.