The Days of Man are Threescore Years and Ten

Retrospective on Turning 70

By this time I had died at birth (obviously lived to tell about it), learned to shoot a rifle from my Grandpa, moved four times and was about to get in the car for my fifth move, saw my Dad cry the only time in my life as we drove away, read a compilation of Bennett Cerf’s essays, the entire 12 volumes of Childcraft books, was an altar boy for four years and knew the Mass in Latin, knew I would be a priest some day, was humiliated as a Little League pitcher, and almost drowned in a lake alone on a family picnic (I never told my parents).

By this time, JFK had been assassinated while I was in Taiwan where I was neither white nor Chinese, beat up a boy named Leslie on the playground to save my skinny, half-breed asses’ place in the fifth grade social structure, had survived as a racial minority in Junior High in Long Beach, CA where I became obsessed with Doni Morris, a poor, shy but beautiful girl who I followed, stealthily from a distance, to her “wrong side of the tracks home” after school just to watch her walk, had moved to Phoenix where I discovered the acceptance of my “Cheech/Chongness” in the art department of Maryvale High School, hippies, girls, Acapulco Gold and Strawberry Hill, grew my hair, got almost seduced by one of my art teachers’ wives when I was helping him grade papers (I was too awkward), joined the Jesus Movement, began to struggle with depression, was voted “Funniest” and “Most Talented” senior (in a class of 950), almost made Eagle Scout, had dug a deep, long trench between me and my Dad who was “Establishment” and had sold out to “The Man”, and left home three days after graduation.

By this time I had fallen in and out of love with a dozen or more “girls”, met my first wife while she was still married to her first husband who preached at a “youth rally” at my church (she was 24, I was 17), reconnected with her 2 years later when they were divorcing, bought her dress for our wedding on our second date and hung it in her closet (she didn’t notice it until I proposed and showed it to her), married her six months later, almost drove away from the motel while she was in the shower after our wedding (but didn’t for reasons still too complicated for me to grasp), applied to Lubbock Christian U. as a ministry major, published an underground school newspaper after I got fired from my editor/writer/cartoonist job with the Official School Newspaper, and graduated in the same fashion I engaged the school culture for four years…

By this time, at the advice of a good mentor/elder who told me in my last semester of Bible College, “Jesus waited until He was 30 to begin his public ministry: Do yourself and the church a favor and follow His example”, so we interviewed for a job with a church supported Boy’s Home at a hotel restaurant near the Phoenix airport where there was a “businessman’s luncheon” going on with scantily clad models in teddy-bear night-wear parading to the tables (the Director was unaware of the event when he scheduled the meeting). We took the job because the Home was closing (we were “rescuers”), the day we showed up the director quit. We worked there for five years and fostered about 60 kids, I eventually became the director of treatment programs and Executive Director until it closed. I became the Campus Minister to Arizona State University for the churches of Christ, finished my Master’s and was working on my PhD in Psych. We applied for an adoption because my wife was infertile, went to Colorado for an interview with the agency to be placed on a two year waiting list and came home with a son because we were willing to accept an inter-racial adoption.

By this time, a year and a half later, we got a call during finals week in my PhD program, I took my Multi-variate Analysis exam, got in the car and drove straight through to Colorado and came home with a daughter, again unexpectedly because we accepted an inter-racial adoption. I mowed lawns on the side to supplement my minister’s salary, at a heated Elders’ Meeting I offered to pay the liability insurance premiums for some bikers who wore their guns to church, eventually got fired from my ministry job because I was “bringing the wrong kind of people to church”, and had to drop out of college because I was jobless with two kids and a mortgage. My marriage was falling apart, I fell into a deeper depression. I read an article in the newspaper one morning about a man who shot his wife and kids then himself in a camper in the mountains because he had lost his job and house and it all made perfect sense to me… I opted for therapy instead.

By this time, I had lost contact with all of my high school friends after my 10th year reunion, I had taken over my brother’s failing construction company after working as a grunt laborer for him for four months while trying to find a job in my psych fields, built it to 55 drunk/addicted/recovering ex-con employees, lost my ass trying to be more godly than God without His wisdom, my book “Lord of the Hunt and Other Tales of Grace” was published, I had been in seven years of personal and marriage counseling that didn’t cure my depression nor save my marriage, fell in love with a church friend’s wife while working together with her on Vacation Bible School, did a “David and Bathsheba Thing”, got divorced, excommunicated, we had a child, re-married (in that order), thus lost my friends of 20 years in the churches of Christ, became Episcopalian, played the blues with the “Episco-Presleyans” and “Sacramental Whine” our church bands, lost my best friend to a heroin overdose while he was in a re-hab facility, and found a book “The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church” (Lossky) in the church library.

By this time, we were raising six kids (a “Brady Bunch”), we and three of our children had converted to the Orthodox Church, I had scaled my business back to myself and intermittent helpers, started an Orthodox Mission parish with four families from the Episcopal Church, did the “Our Life in Christ” radio show for 10 years, wrote “Pithless Thoughts” blog and drew “Orthographs”, nearly broke my marriage in pursuit of ordination, got excommunicated for speaking up to my bishop about his crappy priest assignments, started a second Mission Parish in a new jurisdiction with four families from the first Mission, lost many of my friends from our first Mission, did construction on several monasteries and churches, finally accepted I would never be ordained, took a year hiatus from church after a third dysfunctional clergy assignment in my 12 years Orthodox (this one by a different bishop, but I only got yelled at in a church parking lot instead of excommunicated by this one), I quit reading “theology” and decided to be a Christian.

By this time we had cared for my wife’s father for six years until he died, went through the economic crash of 2010, almost lost our house, I got a job as a guidance counselor with a school, our older kids had started leaving home, graduating college, started careers and vocations, having grand kids, my wife and I danced with the accumulated dysfunction and distance in our relationship, had found a 50 pound tortoise, had put down six family dogs and several old cats, our older children began figuring out their parents, our our divorces and family dynamics, and moving toward forgiveness.

By this time I had bought my first motorcycle (which I was given permission to do after all the kids were on their own), both my parents had gotten cancer, survived treatments but were declining, we had six grandchildren, were virtually raising our youngest grand daughter, I had returned to construction work with a botched knee replacement, co-wrote and illustrated a second book (Fire from Ashes), started the “Steve the Builder” podcast, jumped back into church mission work after the year away with more boundaries (but not enough), began seriously trying to connect to my Dad (who lived 90 minutes away) after his fourth heart procedure during which he had a death-bed conversion to Orthodoxy of which he knew absolutely nothing, my ex-wife died unexpectedly devastating my eldest daughter, Mom had fallen and fractured her back but Dad insisted they were OK on their own, my wife had begun to find her self and her voice in our marriage, I was beginning to learn to hear her but not very clearly.

By this time my Mom had dementia, fallen again and spent six months in a nursing home, we had bought a house with my Dad who finally gave up and moved them in with us, we were still virtually raising our grand daughter, my Dad became more and more angry demented and protective of his wife, my Mom became bedridden and was (thankfully) more Zen demented, we navigated Dad’s control/anger issues and changed Mom’s full diapers, I got ass-cancer during COVID, my wife manned her post caring for all of us valiantly, my somewhat estranged/divorce-traumatized eldest daughter became my cancer treatment shadow and advocate, my dad offered to pay for my co-pays, I was forced into a nearly three year hiatus from church because our parish went ideologically “no mask” during the pandemic while I was going through chemo and surgeries and care giving two dying octogenarians.

By this time I had completed two rounds of chemo, a round of radiation, two surgeries and three hospital stays so I could see my parents die before I did and accumulated three more grandchildren. I had spent three years in a wilderness of dying, death, isolation, introspection, care giving and care-receiving, built several caskets for family and friends, started drawing “Samurai saints” after 50 years away from the Maryvale High School art department, and slowly remodeled our house, my inner self, my relationship to my wife, to my children, to the Church and to God, all framed by finitude, sacrifices made and taken, abandonment, and the vague urgency of realized mortality.

By this time, now two hours before my 70th birthday, I have realized I have seen all my children become beautiful human beings and I will probably not see my nine grandchildren grow to be adults (like my parents did). I have realized I have had a full life, but I’ve lived a life of loss. I have no “life-long friends”, just memories of friends that have changed with moves, first from my dad’s career and then from my church affiliations and dramas. Even so, I have realized that God has been a constant even if my paths, sins, and methods of pursuing Him have been sincere but inconstant and irregular.

But here I am at the end of my Psalmists “promised years” having done some good and much evil. I have realized that I have done everything evil I’ve said I’d never do, I have done nothing I had hoped to do as a young man in faith, careers or relationships. I have realized everything I’ve prepared to do, I’ve actually ended up doing but in ways I never dreamed I’d do them. I have realized I’ve often done more harm by doing what I’ve thought was good than the good I hoped to do. I have realized that even the harm I did, in love, was healed and brought forth beauty (but who knows what beauty could have been without the harm? God knows…) I have realized that nothing in life is magic: self-belief, wishes, plans, preparations, even God and sacraments because WE are the “X-factor”, and we do not know who we are and what we are capable of for good or evil when put to the test.

I have realized I am not God, but I don’t really know what being “not God” is really like. But that said, I have realized I don’t think I’ve really known who God is for most of my life. I have realized that God knows I don’t know that and has accommodated my delusions even when I was/am thinking I was deluded by my former or present knowledge.

In the end, if I were pressed to sum up 70 years: We fight our demons all our life more or less valiantly because we’re trying to love God more or less perfectly, but in the end we are under the mercies of providence from beginning to end.

And at Three-score Years and Ten, if that is all I have learned perhaps it is enough to live to four score years in peace.

(Psalm 90:10).