John Piper writes in appreciation about J.I. Packer’s determination to finish at full pace.
Whatever that pace may be.
This is not an invitation to recklessly overdoing it, or to impose your insecurities on others whose work then becomes enabling you to do what you really can’t.
It’s about committment to freedom.
An excerpt.
This week J.I. Packer turned 88. He has written a book on aging. It’s titled, Finishing Our Course with Joy: Guidance from God for Engaging with Our Aging. At age 68 I found it riveting. It made me want to live “flat out” to the end. That was his goal. You could call it “Don’t Waste Your Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties.” It’s worth reading at any age.
He is not naïve. He is 88! There is no romantic idealization for the final years of this life. It will be hard. “Aging,” he says, “is not for wimps.” Some may paint a rosy picture of life after seventy. Even John Wesley, Packer observes, said that at eighty-five “the only sign of deterioration that he could see in himself was that he could not run as fast as he used to.” With characteristic understatement Packer says: “With all due deference to that wonderful, seemingly tireless little man, we may reasonably suspect that he was overlooking some things.”
Nevertheless Packer realizes that:“the assumption that was general in my youth, that only a small minority would be fit and active after about seventy, has become a thing of the past. Churches, society, and seniors themselves are still adjusting to the likelihood that most Christians who hit seventy still have before them at least a decade in which some form of active service for Christ remains practicable.”
So, what shall we do with these final years? Packer notes that “the image of running was central to Paul’s understanding of his own life [1 Corinthians 9:24–27; Galatians 2:2; Philippians 2:16], and I urge now that it ought to be the central focus in the minds and hearts of all aging Christians, who know and feel that their bodies are slowing down.”
And how should we run? “My contention is . . . that, so far as our bodily health allows, we should aim to be found running the last lap of the race of our Christian life, as we would say, flat out.” “The challenge that faces us is . . . to cultivate the maximum zeal for the closing phase of our earthly lives.”
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