As I grow older, I am becoming more and more aware of my weaknesses, my limitations, my inabilities.
My eyes are growing worse. It’s harder for me to stay in shape. I forget things easily. My hands shake if I drink coffee. I turn to my kids as the experts, instead of having them turn to me. Death is making my acquaintance.
There are, of course, others who are ahead of me in their decline. I watch my parents, who live next door, as my Mom becomes more physically dependent and my Dad more mentally dependent. And then I hear news of the deaths of actors like Alan Rickman and musicians like David Bowie, both of whom I’ve loved for decades, and I feel the march of death in not just my body, but in my world.
So, when I heard that my old professor, J.I. Packer, has lost his vision in both eyes now, I turned to this brief video of him made as a promo for his book Weakness is the Way. Unlike most promos, this one tells more than it sells. It’s powerful both to see Packer’s aged face and to hear his clear voice. So, click on the highlighted link above and be prepared to be moved by his humility and mortality in service of God’s glory.
All the way to the end, Dr. Packer is true to himself. For at the beginning of each class session for the three courses I took with him, he would say, “Theology is for doxology” — we study God in order to worship him — and then lead us in a robust singing of The Doxology.
As I, too, go the way of weakness, may I be so true, pointing to the Glorious One instead of trying to mask my many weaknesses.