He Has More At Nineteen Than I Had At Sixty

He has more at nineteen than you had at sixty.

That is not resentment. You are glad about it, genuinely and without any complication, and you would not have it any other way for him.

It is only that it leaves you standing there with nothing to add.

Everything you can think of, he has, or could have by the weekend, and better than the version you would have found. There is no gap anywhere in that young man's equipment and you have been looking for one for about four years now.

And so you do what a man does. You produce something reasonable, and you feel about eighty per cent of a fraud handing it over, and he is warm about it because he is a good lad and you both move on.

There is a line in the psalms that hands one generation a specific job, and it is not a job anybody else can do.

One generation shall praise thy works to another

Here it is.

One generation shall praise thy works to another, and shall declare thy mighty acts. (Psalm 145:4, King James Version)

One generation to another. That is the whole architecture of the verse, and it is a one way street by design.

Nothing in it can be delivered sideways. It does not go from a peer, or from a book, or from anybody the same age. It travels from a person who was there to a person who was not, and that is the only route it has.

You are standing on the only road that thing can travel, and Psalm 145:4 puts the declaring in the hands of one generation speaking to another. The Holy Spirit is the one who built it that way, and He built it so that an older man is never redundant.

Now the verb, because it is more specific than it looks.

Declare. Not embody, not model, not quietly demonstrate over time. Declare, which means say out loud, in words, to a person who is listening.

That is a spoken act. It requires a mouth and an occasion and somebody in front of you.

You have been asked for words rather than for an example, and it is written that one generation shall declare rather than that it shall be observed. The Spirit of God is the one who chose a speaking verb, and He chose it because the other kind does not transfer.

And notice what gets declared. Works and mighty acts. Specific events. Things that happened.

Not principles. Not lessons. Not what a man learned. What occurred, and when, and what it was like.

You have a lifetime of specific events, and Scripture asks for works and acts rather than for wisdom about them. The Holy Spirit is the one who put concrete nouns in that verse, and the concreteness is what makes it possible for you.

What he cannot get anywhere else

So let me name what you actually hold, because it has been getting discounted for four years running.

That young man can obtain almost anything. What he cannot obtain, from anybody, at any price, is what happened before he existed.

He cannot get what it was like when you were nineteen. He cannot get the year you were frightened and what you did about it. He cannot get the day something went wrong and who turned up. He cannot get how your own father was with you, or what your hands were doing in 1974, or the thing you have never told anybody in the family.

You are the only surviving source of an entire world, and it is written that one generation declares to another because nobody else can. The Spirit of God is the one who makes an old man's ordinary decade into something a nineteen year old cannot buy.

And here is why he wants it more than you think.

A young man with everything is usually short of exactly one thing, which is any sense that hard years are survivable. Everybody around him is his own age and has survived nothing yet.

You are the only person he knows who has been all the way through something and come out the far side still standing, and he has never heard one specific detail of it.

You have evidence that a young man is short of, and the written word puts the declaring of mighty acts in the mouth of the generation that saw them. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes an account of a hard year land as hope rather than as reminiscence.

And a word about the fear, because it is the reason this has not happened yet.

You think it will bore him. Every man your age thinks that, and it is nearly always wrong, and where it is right it is because the telling was general rather than specific.

Nobody is bored by a year, a place, a name and something that actually happened. People are bored by lessons.

You are not going to bore him with a specific thing, and it is written that the generation declares acts rather than conclusions. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a detail carry, and the detail is what carries it.

Tell him one specific thing

So here is what to do, and it is one story rather than an account of a life.

Pick one thing that happened to you. One. Preferably something that happened around his age.

Give it a year, a place, and one other person's name in it. That is the whole recipe and it is the difference between something that lands and something that evaporates.

You are able to do this in about four minutes, and Psalm 145:4 asks for a declaring rather than for a summary of everything. The Holy Spirit is the one who brings one particular year back to a man when he needs it, and He brings it back sharper than expected.

And do not put a lesson on the end of it. This is the discipline of the whole thing.

Do not say and what that taught me was. Do not say so you see. Do not turn it toward him or make it apply to anything he is doing.

Tell it, and then stop, and let it sit there being a thing that happened to a man he loves.

You have permission to stop at the end of the story, and it is written that the generation declares the acts rather than the interpretation of them. The Spirit of God is the one who does the applying later, in a young man, at a time neither of you will be present for.

And do it somewhere with hands occupied, because that is how men talk.

Under a hood. Beside a workbench. In a truck. Anywhere the two of you are looking at the same thing rather than at each other, because that is the only place a nineteen year old can hear something like that without it becoming an occasion.

You are able to arrange the whole thing without announcing it, and His word puts the declaring in the ordinary traffic between generations. The Holy Spirit is the one who arranges a driveway and an afternoon, and He has arranged a great many of them.