February 23, 2007
Rehab
They’re an optimistic bunch over at the rehab center where CP and I workout with all our fellow old duffers. I mean that everybody seems to presume that we each must have something left to rehabilitate or else there wouldn’t be any use for our being there.
But as for me, I’m not so sure. There was a time, of course, when pre- and mid-middle age seemed, over and again when out of shape, to offer an occasion to get back in. It was an opportunity I took more than once and usually with positive result, as if there was indeed some sort of fundament of muscle and bone and gullet left inside with a reasonably malleable condition to take hold of. There’re all kinds of benefits for that, I suppose. There was a group of college faculty I used to “train” with when one of the guys, an English teacher, I remember, said he liked to exercise in the late afternoon especially because it made his pre-prandial martinis taste all the better.
I hate to see the church getting so bent out of shape and condition about its treasures these days and wonder if we might be overindulging ourselves beyond any possibility of rehabilitation. We seem to have a penchant always for taking God’s gifts for granted and forgetting Isaiah’s admonition that we’d best seek the Lord while he wills to be found and not at some other less convenient time (Is 55.6). I imagine (and hope) that God’s grace probably keeps God’s patience somehow in check, but I can never be all that sure, over here as I am on the dark side of faith and with my own limits and all.
I guess, though, that with all its obvious risks and for all we know, during-life seems more certain and reliable than afterlife. That being the case as it surely is, let’s hope rehab doesn’t just mean rehabituate.
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