• If God grants me the longevity of my parents, I am a year or two into the final third of my life. A few years ago, just after turning 50, I asked a friend in his early 70s how quickly the 20 years between us had seemed to go by. He smiled, held up his right hand, and snapped his fingers. That made sense to me. I remember my dad at age 60. The next time I turned around he was 80.
• The Bible smiles on age as the repository of wisdom and godliness, characteristics it views as rare and precious. “Grey hair is a crown of glory; it is gained in a righteous life” (Pr 16:31) and “ Wisdom is with the aged, and understanding in length of days” (Job 12:12). Passages like these are the overt statements of a quiet, consistent message that runs all through Scripture, namely that a handful of crucial qualities are available only with the passage of time. This is why “elders” are the leaders of ancient Israel, the inter-testamentary synagogues, and the New Testament churches. It is why Solomon is exceptional (he’s young); why God sends Paul, already gifted as a young man, into Asia for 10 years to gain what time alone can give to him; why Gamaliel in Acts 5 is able to bring wisdom and the perspective of time to the rash desires of other Jewish leaders; why Moses was 80 years old when he began to lead Israel.
• It’s important to remember the value of wisdom in a day that despises the process of growing old. I’ve never forgotten a passage in a Tom Wolfe novel about Manhattan socialites which said, in essence, that cocktail party after cocktail party a particular kind of woman was missing: “mother.” Whatever happened to that warm, affectionate, somewhat rounded, nurturing presence who brought love, sanity, and stability to our lives? She had been replaced by thin, vain, self-absorbed — yet nevertheless aging — trophy wives.
• Years after reading that Wolfe passage I came across another quote that has stayed with me, this one in a very funny London Review of Books article by public intellectual Clive James. In the last paragraph James shifts from reviewing Judith Krantz’s novel to commenting on Judith Krantz herself (beginning with a quote): “‘Like so many of us,’ she told the Daily Mail on 28 April, ‘I happen to believe that being young, beautiful and rich is more desirable than being old, ugly and destitute.’ Mrs Krantz is 50 years old, but to judge from the photograph on the back of the book she is engaged in a series of hard-fought delaying actions against time. This, I believe, is one dream that intelligent people ought not to connive at, since the inevitable result of any attempt to prolong youth is a graceless old age.”
• I love that last bit, “the inevitable result of any attempt to prolong youth is a graceless old age.” I want to hold before myself, in the years to come, the hopeful words of Psalm 92: “The righteous…are planted in the house of the LORD; they flourish in the courts of our God.They still bear fruit in old age; they are ever full of sap and green.”