Forty years have slipped away since commencement exercises at Arvada West High School. Rob is the sole classmate I have any contact with out of roughly four-hundred, and he alone informed me of the reunion scheduled for next August. Robert F. Kennedy had just been assassinated. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been murdered only weeks before. The surviving crew members of the North Korean attack on the U.S.S. Pueblo were still prisoners. The war in Viet Nam was literally heating up. Yet there I was “hearing” a call to proclaim a gospel of peace, joy and love that made sense to me then and continues to now. Having almost certainly reached the mountaintop and now descending into the valley leads me to reflect upon many things and to wonder how or if the time might have been better spent. I see little value in “what if” scenarios unless they serve to affirm that, aside from a little tweaking here and there, these last four decades have been marvelous. I have loved, I have been loved, and this in and of itself stands as a measure of success. Without knowing, we were headed toward the final chapter of the Beatles and their closing statement:
And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love you make.
Although long ago and far away, it’s a gospel still worth living!
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