Closing up Shop

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