A week ago I sat over lunch with a kind and soft spoken man who is 88 years old. He walks with a limp, is hard of hearing, and drives slowly enough to make an observer wince somewhat frequently. He would be easy to dismiss, overlook, or underestimate as one whose time had passed. That would be a mistake.

We met as he became a primary care giver for his sister, a woman who had made a generous bequest, a gift in her will, to CBF Foundation for the benefit of CBF Global Missions field personnel salaries. After having been her caregiver in life, he was entrusted with the care of her estate as executor for her and her late husband. I admired his persistent frugality as he took up the mantle of their generosity like Elisha after Elijah. He made sure that every penny in the residual of their estates was accounted for and found its way to the Foundation to accomplish the good works to which it had been dedicated earlier by others.

Generosity had already become a natural inclination for him. He shared a story from his childhood as we ate. There were blackberries on his family’s farm and, growing up in the depression, it was frequently one of his jobs to pick them as a supplement to the family’s diet. One day a neighboring family was picking around the corners of the blackberry patch. A father and mother with a couple of children were gathering some berries for what would have probably been nearly their entire meal. This was a poor family with no land of their own who worked as sharecroppers farming other people’s land for a fraction of the proceeds. In times when crops were bad or there were no proceeds, they had nothing. My friend described the ferocity with which he began to protect his family’s land and food as he ran these interloping scavengers off and told them not to come back. He shared how he went home proud that he had acted as a protector of his family and its resources. He did not get the praise he expected from his father. I could still see a shadow of the pain of embarrassment on his face and in his eyes as he recalled his father’s disappointment and harsh correction to his lack of neighborly generosity. The power of that day’s lessons was still evident in him nearly 80 years later.

After we talked of the past, we turned to the future. This was not, after all, a man whose time had passed. My friend is not a Baptist and knows very little of CBF life except what he has learned since becoming involved in his sister’s devotion to CBF. He began to tell me about some of the things that excite him in his own church. Those of us trained on an age graded system of how to organize church life are sometimes tempted to equate ideas about emergent church traditions or progressive social ministry with younger generations. That would be another mistake. My friend looked at me and said, “You know, sometimes I think we lose focus on what’s important in church. We get focused on ourselves and forget about how to reach out and love people who aren’t like us.” He went on, “I don’t know if you’ve heard ‘a these fellas we had at our church not long ago, a Brian McLaren, and a Tony Campolo? They helped remind me of that.”

I suppressed a laugh and said, “Um yes, I’ve heard of them – what did you think?”

“Well” he said, “I sat there for three solid days and took notes on everything both of ‘em said. You know, they don’t agree with each other on everything, and I didn’t agree with them on every single thing, but they helped me a lot to figure out some things I’ve been working on lately. I’ve got some ideas about ministries we should be doing – you know we’ve got to move past just reaching out to people who are like us, we’ve got to get better at loving different people.”

I drove home from lunch praying that God would make me even more generous when I’m tempted to protect what I’ve got, and that God would give me the wisdom to be as flexible and open minded as an 88 year old man who’s learned that being progressive is less about being young and edgy than it is about being faithful, engaged, and attentive to the God who calls us out of ourselves and into an ever changing world of people who are already loved by God.

May God bless us all with lessons of generosity and the wisdom to love.