For years, my friend Jim Campbell and I went to lunch once a month. I always thought of him as the mayor of his retirement community. Big smile. Great sense of humor. Generous, always joking, gently poking fun.

After lunch, we’d visit people in the skilled nursing wing. And Jim always wanted to be the one to pray.

Unless he told you, you’d never know that Jim had outlived his wife. Or that he had buried three of his four children as adults, each lost in a separate tragedy over the course of many years.

He had seen the worst of what life can do. And yet… there was a light in him that tragedy could not touch.

The poet and philosopher John O’Donohue has a name for that light. He calls it a second innocence.

The first innocence belongs to children. It rests on a trust that hasn’t been tested yet. The second can only come later, after you’ve lived deeply. After you’ve seen life’s capacity to disappoint, and sometimes to destroy. And still, somehow, you hope.

O’Donohue writes: “It is lovely to meet an old person whose face is deeply lined, a face that has been deeply inhabited, to look into the eyes and find light there. That light is not inexperienced but rather innocent in its trust in the good and the true and the beautiful. Such a gaze from an old face is a kind of blessing.”

Paul put it this way: “Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.” (2 Corinthians 4:16)

Jim spent a lifetime practicing the things our faith asks of us. Trust. Generosity. Hope. Forgiveness. Over and over again.

I’ve been in ministry long enough to know that kind of light doesn’t just happen. It takes a lifetime of practice.

I’m still practicing.

Prayer: Be near to those who need you near this day, O God. Deepen our ability to forgive, to trust, and to give, even when everything in us resists. Create in us a second innocence, that we might know your peace and become instruments of it. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

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