Reflections on Aging
Real talk about an unavoidable topic
At my point in life—I’m forty-three—Andrew Fuller, my dead theological mentor, only had eighteen years left. C. S. Lewis had about twenty-two. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been dead four years already. I’m almost the same age as my father-in-law when I married his daughter. If the average American male life span is seventy-seven, then it’s reasonable to assume that over half my life is over. I watch my children hit new life milestones and instinctively compare their progress to where I was at their age. Thankfully, they are always ahead of me.
As I age, I find myself doing these kinds of mental calculations regularly. Every time someone noteworthy dies, I enter the data into a simple formula: their age at death minus my current age. That gives me a sense of how long I might have left.
John Piper was forty when he published Desiring God. Tim Keller was fifty-eight when he published his first major book, The Reason for God. He was thirty-nine when he planted Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. It’s encouraging to note how fruitful these men were in their remaining years. You might even say their best years were still ahead of them when they were my age. That inspires me.
The realization that I’m getting older was forced upon me. I don’t think I’m alone in that. You spend your whole life trying to reach the next milestone, trying to grow up. Then, one day, you look up and realize you’re the old man in the room. I literally had that realization one day in the gym when I told my workout buddy—ten years my younger—that it seemed like a lot of old guys were working out that particular morning, and he gleefully responded, “Aren’t they all about your age?” I had to laugh because he was right. Like Nathan to David, my friend let me know, “You are the [old] man” (2 Sam 12:7)!
We’ve been taught not to mention these things. Getting old and dying is not something you’re supposed to talk about in polite company. Age is just a number! And, of course, in a culture that prizes technical solutions for every problem—a world, for instance, in which someone must be blamed for even uncontrollable natural disasters—we often live with the illusion that we can beat aging, too. We’ve even got rich techno-utopians devoting millions per year to proving it. With the aid of unfathomable wealth, science, and technology, death can be defeated if you’re willing to live out your remaining days in a laboratory. Doesn’t that sound fantastic?
Of course, none of that is true. You, like every other human being in the history of the world, are going to get old and die, if you don’t die tragically “before your time,” as they say. Your body is going to hurt and weaken before eventually failing you completely. Your mind may go first as my grandfather’s did when he no longer recognized his own family in the last years of his life. We’d rather not think about that kind of end. Best to keep those folks hidden in care facilities so that we don’t have to. We justify not visiting them with platitudes like, “I’d rather remember him for who he was.” Maybe we’re avoiding more than potential unpleasant memories.
The Bible doesn’t treat death the way we do. You’ll never find a more realist perspective than what is found in the sixty-six God-inspired books of Holy Scripture. The psalmist prays, “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Ps 90:12). And who could forget Solomon’s timeless wisdom? “It is the same for all, since the same even happens to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean, to him who sacrifices and him who does not sacrifice. As the good one is, so is the sinner, and he who swears is as he who shuns an oath” (Ecc 9:2).
Solomon’s conclusion? “Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going” (Ecc 9:9-10). The voice of wisdom says enjoy it while you have it, for it won’t last long.
Of course, the gospel has much more to say on this topic. We know, for instance, that this life isn’t ultimate and that Christ’s redeemed people will live resurrected and glorified with him in his eternal kingdom. Be careful, however, not to misapply this precious truth. The hope of resurrection does not make our current lives meaningless—as if we’re just passing through to get to the real stuff. Everything we read from the apostles seems to point in the opposite direction: resurrection breaks through. It adds significance to our daily lives under the sun. Our temporal lives are more significant because the resurrection is true.
I’ll let C. S. Lewis have the last word on the topic of how best to live in the face of our inevitable demise: “It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill. Let the thrill go—let it die away—go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow—and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life. It is because so few people understand this that you find many middle-aged men and women maundering about their lost youth, at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors opening all around them.”