The old man answered the apartment door in his wheelchair. It had been a development from his fight with what appeared to be Parkinson’s. I could tell his limited mobility, now in his late 80s, was a continual source of frustration for him.
His wife, a woman several years younger, was there too.
“I’ll let him show you around, and I’m going to head out to lunch. I’ll order you some take-out to be delivered while you talk.”
OK, so we were going to talk. I’d wondered why the old man had asked me to his apartment in this rather expensive complex on the Gulf of Mexico. We were friends from the local theatre company, where he’d spent many years onstage before I’d arrived in town. But in the recent years, he’d been restricted to small parts like judges where he could be seated onstage.
Between his scenes, he’d sit on the green room couch and tell endless jokes. He was Jewish, and seemed to be a living library of old Catskills comedy material.
Hey Dave, say this: “I once knew a man with a wooden leg named “Smith”.
I comply. “I once knew a man with a wooden leg named “Smith”.
He replied, “Oh really, what was the name of his other leg?” (insert rim shot)
In his setup for the joke, I already recognized the punchline coming. It had been used in the Mary Poppins film. He had either mixed it with his mental encyclopedia of Henny Youngman humor, or it actually pre-dated the film and was a legitimate part of the old man’s internal collection.
But even if you’d heard the joke before, and even if he’d told it to you just the previous evening, you still wanted to play along. His sense of fun was contagious.
So I didn’t hesitate when he called on the phone to ask me over for lunch. But since we weren’t as close as other theatre people he’d spent years with, I was curious as to his motive.
As we waited for lunch, we got on an oversized golf cart and drove down toward the beach. His complex would be most people’s idea of a paradise to live in. His wife was loving and obviously taking good care of him. And yet his conversations now were much less peppered with the humor I’d come to expect. I could tell something was bothering him.
We made our way back to his apartment, and with frustration he maneuvered it through his halls toward the deck overlooking the beach. I planted myself as we took in the magnificent view together.
“Dave, I want to talk to you about God, if you don’t mind. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking here, sitting in the contraption. I go to church some with my wife, who’s a good Christian. But I didn’t want to talk with anyone there. I consider you not just a pastor but a friend, and I think I’d be comfortable sharing my thoughts with you.”
His condition actually made it hard for him to talk. His voice was weaker than before, and he struggled for enough breath at times to sustain it. The topic of religion had never come up before. Though I’m always open to it, I’d never tried to push it on the old man. But it was clear than in spite of the struggle to speak, he really wanted to talk.
“You probably know I’m Jewish, Dave, but the religious part has never been that important to me. But I’ve found through going to church with my wife that I’m fascinated with Jesus. I’ve come to the belief that if there really is a God, Jesus is probably Him. At least, I hope He is.”
“And now, I can tell my life is getting close to the end. And I guess I want to know if it’s too late, and if you can help me believe…”
I sat in my chair more than a little amazed. A man who was at best a good acquaintance was asking me to help him believe in God. It’s supposed to be a lot harder for me to reach people, but the old man was making it easy for the nervous pastor.
From that point on, I tried to answer his basic questions about God. We started with some logical reasons for believing in God, and why believing in Jesus made sense. He would pose questions, and I would respond. It was all very Socratic, and always friendly.
After about an hour, he seemed to have run out of questions about the existence of God…
“Ok, I think I can see it now. Honestly, it’s not really that hard to believe. I think I’ve seen the proof all around me for a good while now. Life just moves along and you don’t stop and think about things seriously. That is, until you’re stuck with your thoughts in a $#%*&@ motorized chair.”
“I guess my only problem now, Dave, is me. I’ve never killed anyone, but I haven’t really been a boy scout either. I’m realizing now that most of my life has been about me.”
From this point, he talked about his former wives and his children. Regrets, lots of them. I recognized the sound from the ones that occupy my own thoughts. They were the usual regrets most every man has to face at some point. They add up through the years of a life lived trying to gain the respect of people who now no longer care, if they ever did in the first place.
Ambition can lead a man to devote his life to things with no more substance than cotton candy. Five seconds after you finally get them in your mouth, they’re gone.
“Compared to most other men, I think I’m a good man. But I know I’m not really ‘good’. And I’ve never cared for God. So if I come to Him now, is He going to think I’m just taking advantage of Him because I’m stuck in this chair?”
Pretty honest stuff. I sat back and thought for a moment…
“Of course you’re taking advantage of Him now. But that’s OK. He’s been waiting your whole life for you to know Him. And by being stuck in this chair, He’s finally slowed you down and humbled you enough to make you think about Him. But that’s how most of us are.”
“We breeze through life focused on distractions, always avoiding dealing with the questions that really matter. We want meaning, but settle for entertainment. We long for God, but don’t want to play by His expectations. So finally He has wrestled you into this chair and made you think about all those things you’ve avoided until now. But they are the things that matter, and they’re the only things you’ll take with you from this life into the next.”
He nodded as I talked. I could tell he was thinking and inspecting the logic of each sentence. But there was no argument, though I was allowing ample space for him to pose questions.
At this point, we’d been talking for several hours now. I could tell he was tired.
“Would you consider coming back, and continuing this discussion with me?”
You don’t have to ask a pastor this twice.
I returned back a couple of weeks later. We took the huge golf cart down to a little restaurant on the beach. We talked more about God, and God’s love for the old man. Even though much of what I said challenged the way he’d lived his life, he seemed to be at peace.
The message of Christ’s forgiveness and grace surprised him in the face of a life that had mostly ignored God. But it was a message he was happy to grab onto, like a life preserver thrown to a drowning man.
Today, I read a Facebook post saying the old man had died. It was written by his son, a bit prickly in nature. It asked for no flowers, and forbade people from even commenting their condolences on the post itself, though many still did. We all loved the old man, and will miss his songs and punch lines, even though we heard them hundreds of times over.
The son took pains in his announcement to say his father had died a religious skeptic. I thought that was an odd thing to say out of nowhere. In truth, I think it was a shot at the old man’s last wife who’d been a committed Christian and took him to church with her. The son probably didn’t appreciate her trying to change him.
Often, we like to keep people where we’re comfortable with them. That way, they won’t progress any further than we do.
Maybe the son’s right. Maybe the old man died not really believing. I’d moved away from that beachside community over a year ago, so perhaps he drifted back into his skepticism after our two very long conversations a few months before I’d left.
But my memory will always be him sitting in that open-air beachside restaurant, in that motorized wheelchair. I see him trapped in that prison, looking out pensively onto the ocean, and into eternity in his thoughts.
And I see his face, just as “at peace” as the ocean in front of him. And now, I truly believe, he’s free.
