I Decided My Part Of That Was Over

Ernesto handed it over at about sixty and did not tell anybody, including himself, that that was what he was doing.

It was not a decision he could point to. It was a hundred small ones. He stopped putting himself forward. He started saying ask one of the younger ones when somebody came to him. He began describing himself, in a joking way that everybody accepted, as furniture.

And there was something real in it. He had watched men hold on too long. He had seen what a room looks like when the same voice has been the voice for forty years, and he was not going to be that, and he was proud of not being that.

He is sixty-eight now and there are three young people in his church he could hand something to tomorrow.

Not a future. Nothing about what is coming. Just three plain sentences about three specific people, things he has watched carefully across two years and understands about them that they clearly do not understand about themselves.

He has said none of them, and he will not, and when he examines why, the answer that comes back is not humility. It is that a man of sixty-eight who starts telling young people things about themselves is a man who has not accepted his position, and he has worked hard at accepting his position.

The other thing, which he has told nobody, is that he has been quoting a verse to himself for eight years to settle it. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. He says it warmly, and he means it, and he uses it to mean: that part is theirs now.

You may know that handover.

Maybe you also stepped back to avoid becoming the man who would not step back. Maybe you were right to. And maybe you have gone quiet about things you can still plainly see.

The rest of the sentence

The verse you have been quoting for eight years does not stop where you stop it. It is one sentence, it lists ages deliberately, and you are in it.

And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.Acts 2:17

And your old men shall dream dreams.

Same sentence. Same pouring out. Same all flesh, which is the phrase governing everything after it.

Peter is not describing a handover from one generation to the next. He is describing a distribution across all of them at once, and he names three age brackets in a row precisely so that nobody in that crowd could locate themselves outside it.

You have been quoting a third of a sentence and calling it a doctrine about your age.

And notice which end of it he saves for last. The old are not an afterthought there. They are the closing item in the list, given their own clause, in a sentence that exists to establish that this is not for a subset of anybody.

And you are named in the verse you have been using to excuse yourself. The written word puts sons, daughters, young men and old men in one sentence under one pouring out on all flesh, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who brings that to a man who has quoted a third of it warmly for eight years.

And He speaks and you can carry it plainly. The word says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal, and the Spirit is the one who distributes rather than retiring anybody at sixty.

The good instinct that went too far

Now let me be careful, because the thing you did was mostly right and I am not going to flatten that.

You watched men hold on. You saw what it costs a church when one voice is the voice for four decades, and you decided not to be that man, and that decision was correct and it has cost you something and it has served people.

What happened is that the correction went past the thing it was correcting.

Stepping off a platform is one action. Going silent to one person at the end of a table is a completely different one, and there is no reason the first requires the second, and you did both because they arrived in the same movement and you never separated them.

Holding on is about position. What you are withholding now has no position attached to it at all. Nobody would even see it happen.

And what you laid down was a platform rather than a permission. The word says let nothing be done through strife or vainglory, which is a rule about motive and never once a rule about age, and the Spirit is the one who separates those two where a good instinct did not.

And nothing about you is under review for eight years of stepping back. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who stepped back for the right reason and went further than he meant to.

And nobody is putting you back at the front

Let me be plain, because you have already pictured being asked to take something up again and the answer is no.

Nothing here returns you to a platform. Nothing here asks you to speak in a service, take a slot, be introduced, or be anything other than what you have decided to be, and the young ones should keep everything they have.

And nothing here hands you a future to give away. Not an outcome, not a date, not one word about anybody's health or marriage or death, because that is not this and never was, and the fence exists so that what a man says to a young person stays survivable.

What is on offer is three sentences at the end of a table, to three people, one at a time, about who they already are.

And you are permitted to say a plain thing from the end of the table. The word closes the list with the old and their own clause, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a permission rather than a recall to a position you were right to leave.