Lent Day 2 - age

Those of you who read my ordinary facebook posts will know that over the past couple of weeks I have been experiencing a time of extraordinary and unusual blessing.  Too many things to mention here but daily delights ranging from the big ( Keith getting offered two jobs in one week) to the tiny but no less wonderful (a young chap in church on Sunday night coming over to pray with Josh )

Yesterday’s  blessing ( one of them) happened in the morning and I was still grinning about it at bedtime.

I’ve recently made a new friend – it’s such a God thing that I met this wonderful woman and am starting to get to know her.   She is called Simona and is from Romania.    She is a passionate lover of Jesus and a force of nature.   I already adore her and we only just met  J

On Sunday in church Simona was arguing with me about paying for a painting which she had already paid me for but wanted to pay more!  I protested.  She protested.  I said I wasn’t having any of it.  She forced some money into my hand.  I pushed it back.  She whispered in my ear ‘ Im older than you’ and grinned and ran away.   I laughed.   She is so NOT older than me.

So today I asked her how old she is.  42

How old did she think I was?   Well, she wasn’t sure but she knew she was older than me.

When I told her I am actually ten years older than her she just about fell off her chair.   She seriously couldn’t believe it.  It was really funny.  She kept looking at me.  Then she started telling me that I have lovely skin and that I don’t have any lines ( I do, she clearly wasn’t looking too closely) and we laughed.  It is already our tag line ‘ Ah yes, but Im older than you!’  And both of us are laying claim to that line.  Because she feels that she is older than me.  For some mad reason.

For the rest of the day age-related things kept coming across my path.  As a society we do seem a bit obsessed with age. The very fact that I was delighted to be mistaken for someone in my early forties goes to show that it’s a ‘thing’ for me.   It is definitely a ‘ thing’ in churches.  We either moan because everyone in church is too old or we moan because everyone is so young.  Or we struggle to keep all ages happy.  And there are never enough people to work with the children.

The trouble is, when you are young you can have no concept of what it is like to be any older than you are.  Only the old know what it is like to be old.  So we fear becoming old because we don’t know what it is going to be like.  We perhaps have one or two older people in our family circle or set of friends.  And depending on how they age and how they deal with ageing we might or might not have some limited and narrow perspective on what is possibly heading our way.

Ive got a friend in Australia, Kathy, who took up gymnastics in her forties.  Proper gymnastics.  Silks and tumbles and all sorts.  She now regularly posts on Facebook films of 100 year old athletes and 96 year old ladies on the beams and bars and all sorts of amazing people doing ridiculously energetic and impossible things in their old age.

Sarah had a baby in her nineties.  Caleb took a mountain in his eighties.  Noah was no spring chicken when he single handedly built the ark.  But David was a boy when he defeated Goliath and Joseph and Daniel were barely out of their teens when they were ruling nations.    It seems that God has a different attitude to age than we do.

One of my favourite Bible verses is in Psalm 37:25

I have been young and now I am old

Yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken or his children begging bread.

God is faithful and good from the moment we are born to the moment we die.  We have no guarantee that we are even going to reach old age and yet we all sort of assume that this is our right.  We value youth over experience and smooth skin over lines which have ‘fallen in pleasant places’   We dye our hair rather than embracing the crown of silver and cheer when someone thinks we are five years younger than we actually are.   What a nonsense.

I am 52 years old.  I have known Jesus for 36 of those years and He has taught me a mighty amount during that time.   I have a history and a life and I should stand tall and not apologise for that.   He has commissioned me to  ‘speak a word in season to him who is weary’ – particularly to the generation immediately below me.    I need to believe that I not only have something valid to contribute but that that’s because of my age not despite it.   I know that most of you reading this are getting on a bit  ( hee hee hee)   Let us resolve to run the race to the very end.  Let’s not sit down cos our bones ache and there is someone younger coming up behind us who looks fitter and is wearing trendy gear.   We have put in the miles.  We have learned from our mistakes.  We have a testimony of the goodness of God in the land of the living.   Age is just a number.   The words of our testimony are what defeat the enemy and clear the way for those coming behind us.  We have those words.  Let’s use them.