Elder Vintage
My old friend had preached superb sermons when he was younger, but at sixty he feels he’s lost something. His sermons’ complex and penetrating insights into the appointed Scriptures of the day had revealed to me, who heard them as a writer, an intense intellectual effort to understand the Scriptures. He couldn’t do that anymore.
He took a craftsman’s pleasure in the fruits of his work, as well as a pastor’s. “That was a barnburner,” he said to me years ago as we were closing up the church after the Sunday service when I was visiting. And it was. I wondered if the people sitting in the congregation knew what they had in their pastor. I suspect most of them just thought he was smart.
But now, he wrote me, he sat in his study amid the theological library he’d built up over the years, and couldn’t think about the subject the way he used to. “It’s left me wondering if I’m losing my memory, or, as grade-school kids bored with the subject the teacher is on say, ‘Teacher, my brain is full.’”
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David Mills has been editor of Touchstone and executive editor of First Things. He edits the opinion page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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