It is dangerously easy to view aging with foolish naïveté or bitter pessimism. Typically, authors and culture-shapers list or lean to one of these two extremes.
Admittedly, the multiple dimensions and opposing complexities of aging are hard to face simultaneously in a wise manner. However, the Word of God expresses a much-needed fusion in its teaching about the glorious purpose of creation and the shattering implications of the fall.
In the Bible we see this fusion less as a lamination and more of an “alloy of opposites.” Aging is the place where this fusion is most often magnified, intensified, and clarified. It is a tightly-woven braid of the harsh and the holy, the heaven-sent and the hurtful. The sweetest tastes of life reach the palate of the soul along with the bitterest and most sour difficulties.
Why would I say this so boldly?
- Aging is the slow advance of some of the harshest marks of the fall. We are called to face our growing weakness and feel the worst we may have yet felt in our lives, while pushing back the marks of the fall with Gospel faith, profound repentance, and eschatologically-infused hope.
- Aging is a savory blessing of God’s covenant faithfulness. He alone gives long life and crowns our days with gray hair. The long-term pleasurable fruit of preserved integrity, a good reputation, promises kept, relationships preserved, a life rich with encouragement and doing good in the face of evil, which are values so easily and often sarcastically mocked in youth, can now be seen for the priceless beauties that they actually are.
- Aging is the context in which the long-term impact of sanctification is tested and richly manifested, or unmasked as sadly absent. Multiple years of mere moral restraint are exposed. Superficial social charm is shown to be no substitute for profound spiritual change. Faking one’s true condition in life is virtually impossible as we age. Sometimes a beautiful sheen and glow of godly delight glistens through the dimly lit eyes of age. At other times, tamped down rage roars to the surface with explosive force, and subterranean bitterness seeps through the cracks of thinly veneered social proprieties that slip away with age. Age pulls back the curtain on the person that we are. We learn and we show who lives within and behind the person we present to others.
- Aging is the time in life when our bodies finally begin to resemble our true fallen spiritual state. Since the fall, not a single human, save Christ alone, is anything other than broken, weak, and childlike in need for God and others. All the illusions of the rugged independent individualist are shown to be mere folly and fantasy as we age. Such aspirations to human strength are seen to be a comedic “stage play” of sinful proportions.
- Aging is the season in life that can reveal a lack of any sense of final honor or valor to fly the flag of Image Bearer of God, a privilege no angel was ever given. Reflecting God’s Son in our lives means nothing now and meant nothing to us before. We are just fine reflecting merely, sadly, and foolishly…ourselves. Or conversely, it is a time where humility as a priceless virtue is faithfully embraced in anticipation of being further and finally conformed to Christ’s image, disclosing a warrior within that carries the flag right into the fight with death itself, the last enemy.
Praise God for aging’s litmus test of the person who lives within and just behind the person that we present. That person who lives at the far end of our hand shake and just behind the quickly stated, “Hi! How you doin?” Age invites that person to step into the light. I so want for that person in me to resemble the Carpenter from Nazareth! I want the flag of his honor to fly when my last knee hits the ground for the last time.