Closing up Shop
Does there come a time in everyone’s life when
they feel like closing up shop? Does the body that once was youthful and healthy,
seem to be working against you and any feelings of strength and agility? Does
it take you twice as long to do what you used to do?
Do people around you that you love, perhaps
unknowingly, make you feel as if you don’t count anymore?
Do you feel like closing up shop?
Is it normal to feel this way when you’ve
passed the biblical allotted time of life: the three-score and ten? You notice
there are many beautiful and lively people in their 80’s or 90’s who are
cherished for their mind, thoughts, beauty and liveliness. You’re not sure you
will be like them or make it till then so again, the thought, I’m ready to
close up this shop before it gets any more worn and torn.
Closing up shop may help us prepare for the
day we meet our Lord. Yes, it will be glorious and we will have no more earthly
sorrows to contend with. Yet we all know that each day we live, each day we
wake up to a new, untarnished day, we have an opportunity to make a difference
in our world.
This world is not as it was back in the
fifties when I was born. That was a simpler time, a time of a slower pace, a
sense of community and perhaps more family time and fun.
Now everywhere we look there seems to be pain
and untimely diseases and death. Fathers and mothers dying of COVID sometimes
leaving little children alone in the world. Brave officers of the law, leaving their
families too soon as well as the growing opioid crisis and loss from substance
use disorder.
The sixties wasn’t the only generation that
tuned in and turned on as we see a generation hooked on anything that will take
them away from reality.
Many of us see unbelievable things occurring in
our country and it saddens our hearts. Yet we can’t dwell on the negativity, the
sadness, the pain. As much as the thought, closing up shop, isolating and every
man for himself may come, we must instead listen to the Spirit each day.
We must train ourselves to look above and not
below, we must focus on THE WORD OF THE LORD as our help and hope. Yes, we can’t
all get out and change the world right now with actions, but we can with our
prayers.
E. M. Bounds said, “God shapes the world by
prayer. Prayers are deathless. The lips that uttered them may be closed in
death, the heart that that felt them may have ceased to beat, but the prayers
live before God, and God’s heart is set on them. Prayers outlive the lives of
those who uttered them; outlive a generation, outlive an age, outlive a world.”
So, instead of closing up shop, let’s open
doors of prayers and gratitude. Smile, and make people wonder what you’re up
to. Call someone up, write a letter, send a beautiful card to brighten a person
you love up. Hug more. Love more. Make a new storefront for your shop in any
creative way that the Lord leads you. Put the welcome mat out and shine like
the sun.
I’m ending with a quote I learned and loved when
very young:
“I shall pass through this world but once. Any
good therefore that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human
being, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass
this way again.”― Stephen Grellet
