133: the other end of life

giving out Christmas bags at the El Buen Samaritano
seniors home in Vicente Guerrero, Baja Mexico

I went to a funeral the other day. A graveside service, very small.

An older lady sat in front of me. Her gray hair was piled up and patted down into a style I could not replicate. She sat alone. A friend of the deceased.

She would mourn and then go home. Perhaps to a quiet house, by herself, but hopefully to a home full of good memories.

For the first time it really came to me what it must be like for an older person to see each of his or her friends die in their turn, to feel the end of one's life hurdling toward you, and to worry, unwillingly, whether you'll be next.

I honestly don't know what elderly people think or feel. I sit here, not even out of my 20s, feeling like I'm rushing toward "old age" simply because I turn 30 in eight months and haven't started a family. Not that I minimize my own sense of life rushing past. 21 year olds feel the same way, I think.

a happy lady whose Spanish I could
understand until my vocabulary failed me

I guess what I'm saying is, what they are experiencing cannot be minimized either. Just because an elderly person has lived a full life does not mean he/she doesn't, possibly, experience the same loneliness and despair I feel at the beginning of my life. I stand at the front end of an unknown future; they sit at the end not knowing how many years are left in their future. They look around them at their friends and wonder if in the next year they will fall and break a bone, contract pneumonia, get dementia, end up in the hospital, be put in a convalescent home, be forced by their kids to move away from their life and friends, be all but forgotten by their loved ones, die.

I fear the future, but I pretty much know I will still have some kind of full life per God's design. What must it be like to be at the end of a full life and fear that it will end, after all, in loneliness, illness, or lack of independence?

Every season has its struggles. Singles aren't alone in that.

my grandma and I

I hope to one day mature spiritually enough to be a gray-haired 80+ year old resting joyfully in full confidence in my Lord. Wouldn't that be wonderful?

If some of these trying single years of wrestling with God's sovereignty are going to help produce that, it will definitely be worth it.

"The righteous shall flourish like a palm tree,
He shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon.
Those who are planted in the house of the LORD
Shall flourish in the courts of our God.
They shall still bear fruit in old age;
They shall be fresh and flourishing,
To declare that the LORD is upright;
He is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in Him."
Psalm 82:12-15