“Youth is wasted on the young!”
Who wants to sit around and talk about getting old? Not me! But the problem is that there was a price to be paid for those wonderful years spent raising kids from babyhood to adulthood—your youth. No, not your 16 and bulletproof years, the ones after that. When you had enough sense to negotiate people and problems without your mother sitting at home wondering if you are still alive (I guess, I’m talking like a boy). It was a wise man who said, “Give a 50 year old man back the strength of his youth and he will become a danger to himself and everyone around him.” Judging by the behaviour of some of the guys who have tried it anyway, maybe its time to rename that time ‘Mid-life Crashes.’ Sadly, some mothers went through it all twice. The Proverbs writer wrote: “The glory of young men is their strength, And the honour of old men is their grey hair (Proverbs 20:29).
Youth is not wasted on the young. It is their time to experience God’s creation with unending vigour. They can stay up all night, eat mountains of junk food, and enjoy that feeling that this will never end. They need all that energy to keep moving through the changes that come upon all of us—responsibilities! There is little fear at this point in this devotional article that I might burst the ‘bubble of youth’ for the young—This is word #260, I lost them at the title. God makes a way for us to accept our grey-hair years as being just as glorious as the strength of our youth. The trick – and this is what we must move heaven and earth to achieve for our young – is to start them off properly. So that when they realize that life is not their own and things get very tough, they can endure.
Solomon tells it like it is: “Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near when you will say, “I have no delight in them” (Ecclesiastes 12:1). The last thing our youth need is to be surrounded by old people who have long since lost their spark to lost opportunities. The kingdom of Christ is rich with goodness. Opportunities for rewarding service are everywhere. They can look back and say, “This was worth it!” But we must not just tell them—we must show them, today. So that no one can say, “Wisdom is wasted on the old!”