50 Years Ago, When I Was 30

IMAGINE borrowing from the future to invest in your present to make your past better than it could have been.

Gifted a vision — two actually — and fifteen years apart — and joining them together. That’s what this is.

Living a carnal life at thirty-five, not truly walking with the Lord at all, I harboured some substance dependences. Little did I know at that point, but the following year my life as I knew it would end and a new life would begin; the literal turning of my world upside down.

Standing at the end of my driveway, inebriated and puffing on a stogie, God gave me a vision of myself as a near-eighty-year-old. It left me feeling well in my soul.

I got the distinct sense that God was saying “your 77-year-old self will thank your 30-something self for the decisions you’re making (or are about to make) now.” Wow. The problem was, though I was trying very hard to address the issues in my life, I was delaying the action I needed to take to realise the vision. I was getting nowhere. I was deluding myself and I knew it!

As history would reveal I never did take that action. So, God did something to get my attention. He changed my life. And the only hope I had of restoring what I had was to make a new life for myself, beginning with quitting alcohol.

The second vision occurred recently. At the eightieth birthday of a person esteemed by my wife and I, someone who received their PhD close to the time I was born — fifty years ago, when they were thirty — a person who has taken an interest in our family, us, me. The vision imagined the work forward — fifty years of service — of that momentous occasion. From age 80, much diligence and faithfulness, sees a rich legacy. A life very assiduously lived.

If only at age 30 we could receive the gift of our eighty-year-old’s thanks for taking the initiative to work hard at the purpose God’s given us?

It’s a long road, life. So wise to borrow insight from the length of years while we’re still young. Ask God that He might gift you with the ability to see forward so as to impact now.