What's The Weather Like?

My wife and I had dinner with some friends of ours tonight.  Yes, they are old enough to be our grandparents but they are funny, wise, kind, great Christian role models.  We like to hang out with them when we can. 

We have a lot of people we like to spend time with but we make sure to spend time with people wiser and more experienced than us so that we may learn from them.  They also claim that we help keep them young but I think they do a pretty good job on their own.

Two paragraphs from Donald Miller's book Father Fiction paint a wonderful picture of why this is necessary.

I was on a plane a few years ago, flying from Chicago to Portland, and happened to plug my headphones into the jack on the armrest.  On a plane, you can sometimes listen to the radio transmissions coming in and out of the cockpit.  I was curious about what pilots say to each other so, like a good geek, I listened for a while.  It turns out, most of the transmissions are about weather and whether or not the plane is heading for choppy air.  The pilot would radio to a plane that was en route an hour or so ahead of us and get a report on what kind of turbulence they were experiencing; then would turn and radio the plane that had just taken off in Chicago to explain what sort of air we were fling through at the moment.  They system was primitive, but intelligent.

It occurred to me, listening to the pilots talk to each other, how much this is like life.  I could see it clearly, the fact that in life there are people being born, just as others are passing away.  And all the way through life, the guys who are twenty years ahead are teaching the guys twenty years behind what kind of weather they will be encountering at whatever stage of life they happen to be living in.

Do you have older, wiser, experienced people speaking into your life?  If not, I challenge you to find someone by next week.