Today is my birthday. I don’t feel like I’m 53 years old—whatever that means. I’ve never been 53 before, so I can’t say I’m an expert on what it should or shouldn’t feel like. When I was a kid, though, I thought being 50 was pretty close to the end of life. I mean, not even my dad was that old! All I knew about being 50 was that it was twice as old as 25 and halfway to 100.
People who were over fifty years old were a big mystery to me. I thought they existed in a faraway-unknown-region of the world—a place where little kids were never heard from again if they mistakenly wandered into it. I was under the impression that folks from there spoke a different language than “normal” people because I always had a hard time understanding anything they said.
Now that I’m aged well into the faraway-unknown-region I realize that the perceptions I had as a child were right!
There really is a lot of the strange and the unknown for people who live in this stage of life. For the first time, more of life seems to be behind us rather than ahead of us, which can make us ill at ease. We’re confronted with our bodies going through even more drastic changes while our minds take more and more time off. We have learned to use a different vocabulary including words like deficiency, colonoscopy, and prostate.
But there are certainly many wonderful things about being “older” that I never thought I would embrace so readily:
I don’t have to keep trying to be cool anymore.
I don’t have to prove that I can lift big and heavy things—which allows me to get a free pass on being obligated to help people move.
I don’t have to pretend to be relevant or influential anymore.
I can smile at a complete stranger (of the opposite sex) and not have it be misconstrued.
Seriously, the most wonderful thing about getting older is that I now have a long, long history of experiencing God saving my rear end. There is no better way of securing peace for the future, that faraway-unknown-region, than to look back and recount the unfailing, undeniable love of God.
