\n
Don\u2019t Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth!<\/strong> The gums of a horse recede as they age. (Unsurprisingly, so do ours, folks!) That gum recession creates the illusion of a horse\u2019s teeth growing longer. (Did I also hear \u201cLong in the tooth\u201d?) So when receiving a horse as a gift, the giftee is discouraged from checking the teeth of the horse to determine its age.<\/p>\n Not surprisingly, it is considered bad manners for us to ask an older adult if we can check his\/her teeth. We can assume a person is aging by other external observations.<\/p>\n But what also caught my attention about this clich\u00e9 was the notion of \u201cgift\u201d. Are we to assume that the gift of a horse is conditional on the horse\u2019s age? Perhaps. How does that translate to conditional ways we deal with the Gift of being human? Especially an aging human, at that? Other humans? Ourselves?<\/p>\n Sometime in this column\u2019s past, I\u2019ve mentioned to you the great worth of Joan Chittister\u2019s 2008 book, \u201cThe Gift of Years: Growing Old Gracefully\u201d. I don\u2019t recall her ever talking on this gift-horse clich\u00e9; but I do think she goes well beyond the notion that a genuine gift has conditions. \u201cGift\u201d is a non-conditional offering!<\/p>\n So let\u2019s explore that affirmation some: \u201cGift\u201d is a non-conditional offering. When you give a birthday gift to a good friend, do you expect something in return? Maybe you are in a gift-exchange pattern for your birthdays. But what happens if one of you forgets to give a gift?<\/p>\n Is the other person hurt? Maybe. But if you are good friends, the birthday-person can likely look beyond the unintended oversight and simply enjoy the gift of your friendships.<\/p>\n What about gifting within your family? That may be more complicated simply because family relationships are often so much more complex, and are not \u201cchosen\u201d in the same way as strong friendships are. Yet the question remains: Do the gifts given\/exchanged carry some kind of emotional condition with them?<\/p>\n Hopefully they do not. So, if they don\u2019t, why not? I suggest the \u201cno condition\u201d answer has to do the level of Love between the giver and the giftee.<\/p>\n Those wonderfully unconditional gift \u201cexchanges\u201d are small reminders of the \u201cGift of Years\u201d we are offered every moment of every day by God. At least that Gift is offered us without condition. We often call that Grace!<\/p>\n But it seems so difficult for us to accept God\u2019s gift of life without conditions. Somewhere in our religious and cultural upbringing, we\u2019ve been conditioned to think God\u2019s love is ours only when we do \u2013 or don\u2019t do \u2013 certain things. And that seems to be one of the biggest challenges we face to maturing spiritually.<\/p>\n Trusting that God accepts us as we are is too good to be true. At least that\u2019s how we act too often. So we play a destructive conditional-acceptance game, jumping through its moralistic and religious hoops, hoping to get through that obstacle course with our souls intact.<\/p>\n In the meantime, God \u2013 let\u2019s personalize God\u2019s image here \u2013 is patiently standing at the finish-line of that obstacle course, waiting to lift us up, hug us, and say: \u201cYou went through that tortuous effort all for nothing! Nothing you do or don\u2019t do makes me love you any more or any less.<\/p>\n You are a gift to me. Why can\u2019t you realize you are a gift to yourself \u2013 and others? I don\u2019t check your teeth before loving you. You don\u2019t need to either!\u201d<\/p>\n U.S. Army Capt. Cherise Neu, center, demonstrates how to properly check a horse\u2019s teeth and health at a veterinary civic action project in Apia, Samoa, June 5, 2013, during Pacific Partnership 2013. Pacific Partnership is an annual deployment of forces designed to strengthen maritime and humanitarian partnerships during disaster relief operations, while providing humanitarian, medical, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":8822,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[111,6,142],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-8821","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-channels","8":"category-conversation","9":"category-older-adult-ministries"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/INSIGHTS_NuturingElders_horse.jpg?fit=700%2C357&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2l75j-2ih","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8821"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8838,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8821\/revisions\/8838"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nBy the Rev. Paul Graves | Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (http:\/\/bit.ly\/1uXn7NW<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n![\"INSIGHTS_NuturingElders_paul\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/INSIGHTS_NuturingElders_paul.jpg?resize=200%2C200\")
<\/a>I\u2019ve never been an ardent \u201chorsey\u201d person, but I know many people are. Yet my curiosity about where clich\u00e9s\u2019 come from has always included the aphorism \u201cDon\u2019t look a gift horse in the mouth.\u201d Horse people undoubtedly know its origin, but I was intrigued when I discovered the clich\u00e9 has to do with aging.<\/p>\n
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<\/a><\/p>\nCLICK THE ABOVE IMAGE TO DOWNLOAD CHANNELS 77!<\/a><\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"