I had an interesting day yesterday. The first three emails I received and replied to were from people I either rarely hear from or never hear from. The first was from the wife of a couple who were the first people in 1997 to invite Sue and myself to a meal when we had moved into Cobham. (We were not married yet so had meals with our respective hosts: Ralph and Ruth, Richard and Linda… but Rosemary and Rob were the first to invite us outside of our hosts.) I probably have not seen / talked to Rosemary in 25 years. The second email was from a very gracious minister who has worked across Baptist churches (and beyond) and is somewhat restricted with respect to how much travel can now be done. The third email was to let me know that her father at 91 had recently passed away. Kitt was someone I met on a few occasions and was always impacted by his humility and desire to be always moving forward.
History impacting the present. Rewards from heaven for those who have been faithful. And impacts in my life. I wish to be faithful to leave a mark for others who are younger or more recently on the trail of following Jesus, but I also seek to keep my eye on those who are further along the journey and honour their faithfulness (an early email this morning I received was from a couple who are ‘celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary this year’).
By the time I was replying to those three emails I recalled (and I have written about this elsewhere) that in 1991 I was in South Africa at Easter and one morning ‘saw’ a number of things to come. One was a sizeable number of young people who had caught the fire of God (not surprising as there was much talk of an army of ’11th hour workers’) but what caught my attention was that alongside this was a whole group of those who were 55 years old and above. The group might not have been the same size but it was certainly equally,and probably more, effective. Those people were mixed. Some had ‘early retirement’, some had been content to be attenders, others had thought that they were now too far through their lives to make a difference in our planet… but they all had the same element in common. They had recognised they had one life and whether the years remaining were short or long they were repositioning themselves and for many their latter years were more effective than all those years that had gone before.
I appreciate post 55, and certainly post 65, our energy levels drop, other challenges come in to slow us down and restrict us. But… if we are not looking for the public profile there will always be accidental and deliberate ‘cups of cold water’ and ‘2 coins in the treasury’ that can be done. I have been meditating on Paul (I call him a friend much to Judith’s amusement!) being dragged out of the city and left for dead. If we were to shrink the passage we would read, ‘dragged out… got up and went back in’. Love that.
Time for those of us not so young to find out what that might mean for us.
A number of people who are roughly my age (55+) have said to me recently ‘why can’t we do…’ In other words it is a mindset shift that has been provoked in them.
I have been frustrated (ask Gayle) why the average of those who join me on Zoom meetings is around 105 years old (ask Gayle I never exaggerate) – where are the 23 year olds I ask. They might come; they might not come. But what a resource for kingdom involvement is present with those who can only just remember what 23 looked like.
I honour those who have walked this path before and have gone on to receive a reward; I desire to see those who are 23 carrying a level of maturity that maybe a 46 year old and who have no fear; but I also see that now is an opportunity for the breath of heaven come to those who are no longer 23 but still have time left.
Got to make sure I have some cold water and am ready to deposit those coins.
Loved this, Martin 🤣🤣— especially your line about Paul being dragged out, getting up, and going back in. It feels like maybe being asked to do the same — not necessarily to go back into the same city (same no longer same same) , but to go back into the conversation, even when the language has changed.
People under 40 often speak in fragments — soundbites, scrolls, voice notes — and it can look like disinterest, but it isn’t. It’s just a new dialect of connection. I’ve had to learn to talk-type that way myself, to carry presence where they already live. Maybe breath of heaven now looks like learning new speech patterns while staying true to what God has said.
Paul went back in. A call — to go back in, not to the system or the old forms, but to the field as it is now, and keep showing up there.
The passage you’re drawing from in Lystra still has Barnabas beside him — that first “go back in” moment. But I keep thinking about how, later, the road changes and he walks without Barnabas. It isn’t neat or tidy — it’s rupture. The pattern repeats: he keeps returning, but never to quite the same place or with quite the same companions. Kinda true of us too — the call to go back in stays, even when the company and the landscape have shifted.
I also wonder if the city was the same when Paul re-entered. He wasn’t the same man; the story had already turned. Maybe that’s what re-entry really looks like: going back in, but not as the same person, and to the same/not same place. The landscape has changed, and so have we. Yet the call is the same — to keep returning where breath still moves.
Paul once used the language of the temple to reach temple people — altars, offerings, mercy seats. Maybe our “temple language” now sounds more like scrolls, swipes, and soundwaves.
In Lystra they called Barnabas Zeus and Paul Hermes — mistaking human presence for divinity, confusing message for messenger.
It was the first recorded moment of celebrity spirituality: the instinct to idolise what should have been simply received.
Paul and Barnabas tore their clothes because they understood what was being lost — the miracle was not that gods had come down, but that God had come close.
We live in the opposite distortion now.
The world is no longer hungry for idols; it is exhausted by them.
Having built altars to platform and visibility, people are weary of performance and desperate for trust.
The new sacred space is no longer the stage, but the circle of safety — places where no one is performing, no one is recording, and presence can breathe again.
If Paul was called Hermes — the messenger who carried words between worlds — then perhaps the calling of this generation is to reclaim that vocation rightly.
Not as icons to be worshipped, but as translators of presence across digital thresholds.
They speak in fragments, scrolls, and soundbites; it is not disinterest but a new dialect of connection.
They are the threshold generation — fluent in the language of screens, yet longing for something embodied to meet them there.
To return, as Paul did, is to go back into a changed city with a changed self.
The Spirit still says, go back in — not to rebuild the old temple of fame, but to rediscover the God who walks through the feed and the fragment.
The medium keeps changing, but the Presence never does.
Good stuff Martin. Encouraging for those of us in this season and especially for those ‘not in the public profile.’