RHAPSODY OF AN AGED CHRISTIAN
WRITTEN FOR S.W. DUBOSE
BY G.W.S.WARE
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Time since my birth is eighty two years
Thoughts through them my memory now steers
To joy and sadness around me whirl
Things of heaven and things of this world.
The first eighteen years of my life I gave
To sinful things, in poverty vale.
To be poor in wealth and poor in sin,
Gave me horrors without and within.
While in my distress, I heard one day
That I could repent; to God could pray.
That He would take and make anew,
With His promise to carry me through.
All these years He has proven to me
Kept by His power and grace to be
Revealed in Christ, a marvel of grace
To be made perfect, to see his face.
If I had sinned these sixty four years
Result would be an ocean of tears.
For had I followed my sinful mind
I would now be poor, naked and blind.
As I now look down my road through life,
I see it all cluttered and torn by strife
Caused by my fighting to reach my goal
To drive sin and doubt from off my soul.
When I was young, I prepared for this
My spirit sustained by Divine grace
To trust in God, my sins blotted out,
To conquer the world, all sin to rout.
Satan would attack, my soul to rush
With horrid demons my life to crush,
With terrific force to take my life
From our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
No such battles, a sinner will say,
Ever comes to me to urge and sway
me, from my sins, to ever say nay,
to sins of pleasure, which come my way.
With a sneer, a critic comes along,
Says, Old man, if to God you belong
Why is it since the day of your birth
Your sorrows are many, with few of mirth?
Hear my answer: Satan never finds
Anything to fight in a sleeping mind.
If you sleep on in your deadly gloom
You shall awake on your day of doom.
Then will you weep and wail, your teeth will gnash
That Satan on earth made you so rash
To take ease in sin and think all’s well
Till he wakes you up, with him in Hell.
Yes, I know some men, who live your way
Their lives are harder than mine today.
If they do’nt repent, no tongue can tell,
Things they will suffer forever in Hell.
To go into death, like some have gone,
From every good thing by demons shorne,
Too dear a price for sin in this world,
Then down to Hell, forever be hurled.
Christ came to me through His death- the gate
And told me that I, His cross might take.
His cross is easy, my burden light
As onward I go in great delight.
It is promised of God to give old age
But some may shudder lest it should stage
A vale of sorrows, they so much dread.
They sign and moan I’d rather be dead.
This promise of God I always take
For he is in all the years I make
To lay up treasures for us to meet
The King in His beauty, us to greet.
Pathetic to live and never to learn
That old age has charms and for them yearn
To brace the life, develope the mind
To the glory of God and mankind.
Here, now am I, on the border land
My firm ground of youth has turned to sand.
These eighty two years have brought me here,
My spirit in God, I have no fear.
Now here in old age, I stand to prove
The preserving power of God’s love.
Though I am old, my youthful days gone,
Now in His arms, I am borne along.
When in Heaven I look down to earth,
See oceans of sins, on waves of mirth;
Sinful pursuits, so awful in crime,
Freedom from them, forever is mine.
