Somewhere, tucked inside the fog of distant childhood memories, is an unforgettable interaction with a man who himself stayed in the shadows. Graybill Wolgemuth was my father’s father—a man with persistently whining hearing aids, an unwelcoming beard, a posture of seriousness, and a famine of words.
He walked with God. Quietly. Stoically. Obediently. Joylessly.
There was a day, still indelibly etched on the childhood tablet of my life, when Graybill made a passing comment about how much he still had to learn about the God he esteemed.
The humility and vulnerability of that comment felt like a bullhorn to my soul. “Surely,” I thought as a young boy, “at my grandpa’s age there was nothing left for him to learn about God, and life, and virtually anything else.”
I have no context for this memory. No vivid recollection of the incident that invited such a transparent and uncharacteristic confession.
But the words landed. Not in a superficial way—but deeply. A placeholder for future reference.
Graybill Wolgemuth was a POW in the prison camp of suffocating legalism. He could not breathe deeply of grace because his spiritual oxygen supply was constrained by the fear of God’s temperamental and conditional love.
Perhaps this is what he was signaling when he commented on how much he had yet to learn. Perhaps he had just read the words of Jesus in John 21, when the Savior’s questions to Peter were not about obedience, or knowledge, or restraint, or compliance—but about love.
Perhaps the three questions directed toward Peter landed deeply on Graybill’s soul.
And perhaps it is the fact that those three probing, confirming questions of Jesus have landed on my own soul with unsettling impact that draws me back to my paternal grandfather. Perhaps it’s the fact that today, as I turn 70 years old, I am compelled to confess what Graybill once confessed: I, too, have much to learn about Jesus.
Not about biblical trivia, but about the life-propelling reality of His unencumbered love. There is more to know of His humility, His sacrifice, His mercy, His justice—and the transcendence and resilience of His love.
The
classroom never closes. The Teacher is never absent.
“‘And
in the last days it shall be, God declares,
that
I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh,
and
your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and
your young men shall see visions,
and
your old men shall dream dreams…’” —Acts 2:17 (ESV)
Old men dreaming dreams. Even at 70.
I am my grandfather’s grandson. Liberated from the prison that held him, but
equally aware of my need for remedial education in the beauty of God’s lavish
love.
Now—even now, especially now—I am a student of the majesty, beauty, and
tenderness of Christ.
Even at 70.
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