A Single Root

When our family moved to Tyler in 1984, I began teaching a Bible study group in homes and then a Sunday School class. Many years later a friend asked, “What do you think your best contribution in life will have been?” I did not need long to think about it. “I have been a Bible and Sunday School teacher for the largest part of my life now and other than being a husband and father, I think that is the answer to your question. I am a Sunday School teacher.”

In October, Carol and I shared our decision with the class that I am retiring from full-time teaching. It has been forty years since I started teaching in Tyler and, as you know, there is something significant about 40 in Scripture. The ark was afloat for 40 days and nights. Moses was in Midian for 40 years before leading Israel out of Egypt. It is often used as the sign of one generation passing and another rising up to replace it.. Jesus spent 40 days with the disciples after his resurrection. It’s a long list but 40 is often used as a measure of completion. It is this last use of 40  that has prompted my decision to retire.

It is not an issue of health, dryness, burning out, or losing interest. It is the genuine sense that my time for teaching is completed. Each generation has a task to fulfill and this has been mine. I don’t sense my life is over - just that my assignment to teach is accomplished. Peter said when David had served God’s purpose in his generation, he fell asleep and was buried with his ancestors. That is not at all what I am thinking! There is a next chapter and a next assignment I am certain. 

Part of that next assignment includes the blog you have been receiving - some of you since the beginning when I was asked by a friend if I would consider sharing what I am thinking. “People are curious about why you think the way you do.”

Whether it was false humility, fear, or an aversion to being put in a box, I declined. Two years later, I changed my mind when I remembered the old saying that you don’t know what you think until you have written it down. It was not out of a desire to share that I started writing a weekly blog but, selfishly perhaps, a desire to know for myself what I thought. Just as Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately, I started to write deliberately to discover what I believed. That was 13 years ago.

While I had an interest in so much, I had never been disciplined about a point of view. I suppose that is why these years of blogs have never been about a single theme but topics that have caught my attention either through my work at The Gathering, teaching Sunday School, or just general curiosity.   Whether it is philanthropy, society, family, meaning and purpose, or faith, I felt an urgency about writing. Of course, it mattered if people read them but that was not the initial purpose. I did not write to influence or shape opinion. I did not write to build a platform or a following. It was not telling an audience what I thought as much as it was explaining myself to me! Annie Dillard wrote, 

"Write as if you were dying.  At the same time assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients.  That is, after all, the case.  What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon?  What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?"

So, while I have retired from teaching I have also decided to change the format of the blog. Starting in January, I am going to write a single piece from one book of the Bible for as long as it takes to work my way through all sixty-six books. That means sixty-six blogs. After that, who knows? I do know that the older I get the more I subscribe to Annie Dillard’s advice and take seriously what I want to leave behind. It is not opinion pieces or editorials but what my Catholic friends call the “deposit” of revealed truth in Scripture.

In the last 13 years I have experienced the satisfaction of being connected to you when I receive the comments and notes from people reading and listening to the blog. This has become an extension of a community for me and while we do not all meet in person, it seems certain that we are all bound, like redwoods, by a single root. I hope we can remain connected.

Photo by Fred Smith

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