Steve West: Growing younger in Christ

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is July 28th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. Up next, Commentator Steve West on becoming a grandparent for the first time, and how he’s seeing God’s handiwork in new ways.

STEVE WEST, COMMENTATOR: “I just became a grandparent” is one of those phrases likely to bring a smile to even those with melancholy dispositions. Since my granddaughter was born five weeks ago, I’ve been saying that to shop clerks, servers, repairmen, and other strangers, and so far it hasn’t failed to elicit a smile.

But there is a wistful sense that I’ve suddenly crossed an age horizon from whence I will not return. I have to get used to being referred to by an as yet undetermined name common to grandpaternity. It’s as if overnight I’ve been launched into my twilight years. After all, there’s one thing my own grandparents seemed to have in common: They were old, or at least I thought so when I was a child.

Yes, this new chapter of life has been accompanied by a wave of nostalgic memories. A carefree childhood roaming the streets and unfenced backyards of our suburban neighborhood, playing kickball, building forts, and pretending to be superheroes. Freedom provided by a 1972 Camaro that would take my teenage friends and me anywhere we wanted to go. And even that first year of college the sense that home was always there to return to, where my clothes would be laundered and I would be fed, and where I was loved.

But memory is selective, one of the problems with nostalgic longing. My idyllic childhood was interrupted by race riots in our southern city and fights at school. When I was eight, my mother left our family, though she returned to my father some months later and remained. Since then, my parents have flown to the Lord, and there’s no longer any home to return to.

The Bible doesn’t commend nostalgic longing. Lot’s wife, fleeing for her life, looked back on life in Sodom with longing for what had been, and was turned into a pillar of salt. Scripture does tell us to remember, but always for its impact on life in the present. For the Jews, that was the Exodus, the story of how God brought them out of Egypt. Or how the Lord restored them to the Promised Land after seven decades in captivity. For Christ-followers, remembering is coupled with gratitude for God’s faithfulness—not a longing to go back to even the good that has been.

Brooding over this epiphany, I look up and on a shelf in my office amongst a collection of record albums is one purchased 50 years ago when I was 14, titled Another Side of Bob Dylan. It features the song “My Back Pages,” the meaning of which was a subject of fascination to me as a teenager. Dylan wasn’t a Christian when he wrote the song… and his lyrics are often pretty cryptic. But one line resonates with me these days: “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

As a Christian, those words remind me that life isn’t lived in our back pages, but in the eternal youth of now and the hope of what is to come. My growing delight in Christ makes me long for the future—for the songs to be sung, words to be written, and work to be done. And in my granddaughter’s eyes—in the wonder she will help me see again—I’m getting younger.

MY BACK PAGES SONG: Ah, but I was so much older then, I am younger than that now.

I’m Steve West.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.