Aging: The Master Teacher

 Living agelessly teaches me to pursue personal and spiritual transformation. Aging beckons me to cross over my troubled waters and find new life across the bridge. It’s scary crossing that bridge.  I’m scared of heights and the angry water below sends fright through my bones.  But aging itself, God’s wisdom-granting promise of new life, holds my hand walking over that perilous bridge, and brings me safely across where I find new life. It’s there where I know that I am ageless. “Living agelessly is the central purpose of the second half of life.”

 Living agelessly teaches me to tend the garden of my soul. I sometimes imagine my soul as a garden inside me. Most times I see this garden as wonderfully verdant, with large leafy plants lining a path; with flowers festooning everything and everywhere, and large shady trees that allow just enough rays of sunshine to wash all of this beauty with a crown of glory. I marvel at and in this garden. But, at other times the garden seems to wither within me. The leaves drop, the path is dark and the flowers strangely disappear. At these times I know...

 Living agelessly teaches me to light the sacred path to resilience. Aging well (which is a choice) requires resilience.  Some folks call resilience the “Queen of Virtues” because resilience is actually a combination of many virtues. What is resilience? The capacity to heal, and grow yet stronger. The capacity to recover from sickness, and rally back from painful setbacks. The process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy and/or threats. The self-regulating and self-adjusting tendencies of the organism. The hardiness needed to change unfortunate situations into advantageous ones. To pull brokenness away from the shadow of a...

I can live more ageless in the Lord as I learn to live in the ever-new abundance of God’s inner light in me.  I have, in the deepest recesses of my being, what we all refer to as the soul.  I imagine my soul as a light of immeasurable brilliance.  This light is the “holy of holies” within me; it’s the presence of Christ.  This light is the energy of grace that shines everlasting Love in every aspect of my being: body, mind and spirit.  My earthly quest is to live in this Love, to thrive in God’s grace, to...

I can live more ageless in the Lord as I learn that as my body diminishes (as all things physical do), my true spirit advances.   I entertain the notion that what I see as reality, i.e., all things tangible, might not really be the “realest” reality. I imagine that I have scales over my eyes. Then, very gradually, by a process we call aging, these scales, very, very slowly, slide off my eyes, revealing what is actually the “realest” reality… the truth, beauty, and goodness of God’s Love all around me.  As aging gives me clearer vision; my true...

I can live more ageless in the Lord as I learn that the true purpose of maturation (aging) is gaining closer communion with God.  Why did God invent aging? What is the point of aging? Why was I born, and then grow into maturity, only to reverse the process and give-up all that I have gained?  Why the loss?  Why the suffering? What has God got in mind for me? When viewed through my human, i.e., worldly eyes, aging does indeed seem pointless and even cruel.  But, when I can catch a glimpse of aging through the eyes of Christ,...