I am sixty-six today. The photograph above was taken a few days ago, on a walk under trees turning gold. I am smiling in it, and I am holding a cane, because I still walk with one. Five years ago, I could not walk, or speak clearly, or do the simplest things for myself.
It began with a sinus infection, which led to a scan, and the scan found a giant aneurysm at my brainstem — a condition the doctors at Mayo Clinic told me would likely be fatal, the only case of its kind they had ever seen. I was taken into a crowded operating theatre, laid face down, and I expected not to wake. What I felt there was peace — not bravery, not resignation, but pure peace.
The surgery could only be partly completed, and I came out of it almost completely disabled. I would lose my singing voice for good, my financial services practice, and more than half of our income. There were two brain surgeries followed by a stroke, and months of therapy, learning again to walk and to talk and to do the simplest things. There were mornings when I looked in the mirror and did not recognize my own face.
I have lost so much of who I thought I was — the voice that had been braided into everything I did, preaching and singing and speaking into a microphone; the career; the body I used to live in, which does not work as it once did. If you have read these letters for a while, you already know this part of my story. I tell it again today for one reason: I am still here, and I want you to know what five years have taught me about what a life is for.
The first thing is that God was with me through all of it, and I have never lost hope in Him — not once, even in the worst of it. Let me be plain about what that hope does and does not mean: whether I live or die has never been the measure of whether God is good. He knows what is best, and His goodness does not rise or fall with my outcome. What I know is that He was in the room with me, and He has seen fit to bring me through the worst of it for His own purposes.
The second thing is that I am still of use. I still pastor, I still write these letters, and I am still at work on a novel about my ancestors in fourth-century Ireland. None of that is a return to the life I had before — it is a different life, smaller in some ways and slower in all of them. But it is a life, and it is mine to offer — what I care most about now is simply that I am available, whenever He has a use for me.
That is where the apostle Paul comes in. In the book of Acts, Paul is preaching in a synagogue at Pisidian Antioch, and he gives the people a brief history of Israel — God choosing their fathers, bringing them out of Egypt, giving them judges and kings. When he reaches King David, he says this: “For David, after he had served the purpose of God in his own generation, fell asleep and was laid with his fathers” (Acts 13:36).
Read that sentence again, slowly. After he had served the purpose of God in his own generation — that is the whole eulogy. Not after he had built an empire, or slain the giant, or written the psalms, or won his battles, but after he had served the purpose of God in his own generation.
David is a strange man to hold up as the example, because his failures are as well documented as his victories — adultery, conspiracy, a murder arranged, a family falling apart in public. If a life were judged by its worst chapters, his would not survive the reading. Yet this is how Scripture remembers him: he served the purpose of God in his generation.
I think about that on a birthday, because birthdays are a kind of accounting: sixty-six years, a body that does not work as it once did, a voice that will not come back, a cane in my hand on an autumn walk. If I measured my life by what I have lost, the account would be a sad one. But I do not believe God measures it that way. I believe He asks a simpler question: in the generation you were given, with the strength you were given, for the years you were given — did you serve My purposes?
That question is not only for me — it is for you, too, and I ask it gently, because I know what it costs to hear it. Your generation is the people around you right now: your family, your neighbors, the ones who sit near you on a Sunday, the ones who have stopped coming. Your purposes are not necessarily large ones — a phone call, a prayer, a letter, showing up again when it would be easier not to. Serving God’s purposes in your generation rarely looks impressive while you are doing it; it mostly looks like availability.
So here is what I want, on my sixty-sixth birthday: to be remembered the way Paul remembered David — not for my achievements, not for my misdeeds, and not for what I have lost, but for serving the purposes of God in my generation, failures and all. And I want the same for you. Not a tidy life, and perhaps not an impressive one — a useful one, in the hands of a good God, for as long as He gives you breath.
Five years ago, I lay face down in an operating theatre and was prepared to wake up in Christ’s physical presence. I woke, and found myself still here, and still available for His use. That is why I celebrate today.
For Your Reflection
These are for you to think through on your own, or to talk over with a friend, your spouse, or your small group.
If someone wrote one sentence about your life — the way Paul wrote one sentence about David — what would you hope it said?
Who are the people in your generation — the ones God has put within your reach right now — and what would serving His purposes among them look like this week?
Is there something you have been treating as the measure of your life — what you lost, or what you achieved — that God may be asking you to set down?
Grace & Peace,
Pastor Neal Letteney <><
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"serving the purposes of God in my generation, failures and all." Amen! Such a profound sentiment and goal. Happy Birthday Dear Brother Neal!