I taught Sunday School for about forty years, and for most of that time I was guided by a simple rule: I didn’t teach anybody under four feet tall or over fifty years old. The first part of that rule was because I’m not a good match for children; I tend to talk to them as if they were very short adults. The reasoning behind the second part was two-fold: I wasn’t sure I had anything to teach people who had lived longer than I had, and I really didn’t believe that most of the older Baptists would be comfortable with what I considered a very orthodox, but nonliteral approach to the Bible.

However, when we moved to First Baptist I was, for the first time in years, without a class to teach, and the word must have gotten out. I received a call from Lorenzo Acevedo asking if I wanted to audition as the teacher for his class. He made it very clear that this was an audition; if they didn’t like me, they’d let me know.

Evidently my trial lesson went reasonably well because the class decided to keep me. I found myself teaching the oldest Sunday School class in the church. The quip was that you went to Holmes’ class; then you went to heaven. The quip would have been funnier if it hadn’t been so true.

The class and I were together for ten years, and they seemed to be up for whatever I could bring them. One year we did a complete survey of the Bible, and one of the members told me that it was the first time he’d ever read the Bible all the way through. Another year we studied the history of our denomination, something that most life-long Baptists know very little about. I think a lot of what we studied was new information to the class members. Probably a lot of them were uncomfortable with parts of it.

Every Sunday morning was a joyous occasion for me. Not only did I get to go to one of the few places in the world where I still lowered the average age, but I got to study with and teach some of the nicest people I’ve ever known. They said that they learned something from me.

I know I learned something—probably a lot more—from them. I learned how people successfully grow old.

I don’t like being old. I come from a long line of people who—however unsuccessfully— vigorously fought aging right to the end. My father celebrated the 25th anniversary of his 39th birthday. And about the time I started teaching the Old Folks’ class, I was staring down the barrel of the future and not liking what I saw at all.

But it’s hard for a sixty year old person to feel really sorry for himself when he’s talking to a ninety year old. It’s hard to really focus on your own increasing aches and pains when your class comes in—smiling and chatting—on canes and walkers. And it’s hard to get your back up when you disagree with someone when each week you have twenty people, each with more life experience than you have, listening intently and looking as if they thought you made sense.

But those are generalities. There were some very specific things I learned from my Sunday School class.

One is that just because you’re old, you’re not done. These were people who had accomplished things. They had raised families. They had been executives, school teachers, and librarians. They had been a vital part of their community. Now that they were retired or physically unable to do some of these thing, they still found something they could do.  I imagine they had their own complaints about getting old, but they didn’t share them with me. Except for the modern music in the blended service, there was very little they complained about.

They actively loved each other. This may have been a generational function or of where they had grown up, but they were significantly more involved in each other’s lives than a lot of city dwellers. If somebody was missing from the class on Sunday, several people could tell us why because they had called and checked on them.

They were respectful. People could disagree in that class without rancor. For a couple of years, our class had a Catholic member, the product of a mixed marriage: the husband was Catholic and the wife Baptist. Each Sunday they went to Mass, then came to Sunday School. The husband was articulate and well-schooled in the doctrines of his faith, and I made a point of asking him to offer another point of view when we dealt with something that our denominations differed on. The class listened, and if any of it bothered them, they kept it to themselves.

Essentially they were dealing with old age by being determined to live until they died, not giving a bit of ground they didn’t have to.

One of the first people I met on the Sunday of my audition lesson was Bill Williams. And the first thing I noticed about him was that he had to use one of those metal canes with three legs on the bottom. The second thing I noticed was Bill didn’t let it touch the ground. I’m guessing his wife and his doctor had impressed on him the importance of carrying a cane, but somehow he’d missed the message about using it.

And Bill also embodied another quality that seemed to be generously distributed throughout the class: humility. He was a man who had accomplished a lot of things in his life. He’d been a colonel in the Army during WWII. He’d stayed married to the same woman since they both were young. He had held executive positions in a number of companies and had prepared well for what turned out to be a long retirement. But you would never learn much about any of that from him.

In his last days, Linda and I would occasionally visit Bill and Nell. The women would talk flowers, and Bill and I would touch on the news of the day. Every time, when we left, Bill said the same thing: It’s really nice for folks like you to come to visit a fellow like me.

I said the same thing about him when I gave the eulogy at his funeral.

These were just people, not a saint among them. But when I go out into the world today, especially in Atlanta traffic, or when I’m on the internet, I wish that there were a lot more like them.

I’m trying to grow old like they did.