Finally, after all these years this song is mine this week:
But I’m not asking what the Beatles’ asked: “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64?”
I am asking something else. It started when I hit 40 That day I went for a walk on the loop of our gravel road, my husband and our kids. It was November. The kids dragged sticks in the road and chased each other, I kicked the sparse alder leaves fallen to the road’s edge and thought about getting old. About what kind of old woman I wanted to be. I had just started to color my hair, which was greying around my face. I didn’t want to be invisible. I didn’t want to blanche into pale translucence and fade away with a whisper. When I was eighty, I decided, I would go shopping in a purple jogging suit. I would wear bright red lipstick until I died, no matter how wrinkled my lips got. I would stay interesting. I wouldn’t rattle off the ever-expanding catalogue of my body’s ills and spills to the unfortunate man filling up his car next to me at the gas station. I would be kind and generous but feisty and wearing whatever I like.
When I turned 50, I woke up that morning with an eye infection and my husband threw me a party. A houseful of friends came for lunch. The night before my mother and sister jumped out of a closet, flying all the way from the east coast to surprise me. We ate huge cold-cut sandwiches, cheesecake, drank root beer and lemonade and laughed. I asked everyone to bring a recipe or a story. We spoke around the table, one by one. Sue, ten years older than me, gave me the best present of all: “I loved my fifties. It was the best decade ever,” she smiled at me. Then the sun rose and set, the rivers drained into the ocean, my kids grew. We laughed around the table every night. Mothers and fathers died, suddenly. I scattered stones. I mourned. I wondered how to live with such losses.
Then I turned 60. On the same day my youngest son turned 15. (Yes, he was born on my 45th birthday. Surprise!!) My sons and daughter married. I spent my days locked in closets wrestling with God, writing books. I traveled. I taught. I plucked the grey from my eyebrows. I tried to hide my wrinkles. I grieved the thickening of my waist. I wore bright lipstick every day, even to the gym where I tortured my muscles and felt glad to be alive.
In Ecclesiastes, one of my favorite Old Testament books, the “preacher” wrestles with the meaning of life. Through 12 chapters he comes at the question again and again, “What is meaningful to do all the days of my life?”
Three times the Preacher answers his own question. In my favorite rendition he advises,
“Go, eat your food with gladness and drink your wine with gladness for God has already approved what you do. Always be clothed in white and always anoint your head with oil. . . .” (9:8, NIV)
At 64 now, I’m trying to do this. I am working harder with more joy. I am no longer working alone. I have ministry partners and teams. I’m a grandmother twice over, soon three. I have 100 jobs every day and somehow it all happens. I feel useful. I feel needed. I feel unworthy and inadequate but I no longer let that stop me from eating and drinking gladly and doing all that God puts in my heart.
But I know that someday I will lay it all down. I will arrive where the writer of Ecclesiastes arrives at the end of the book: at the door of the house of the fragile man, the bent old woman “whose teeth are few, whose sight is dimmed.” Soon, he writes, their dust shall “return to the earth as it was,” and their spirit shall “return to God who gave it. “
I’m closer now to that house than I’ve ever been before. We all are. We’re standing on the porch, before that cracked door. I don’t want to be afraid. (Don’t be afraid!) And I’m not. Because the one who has filled my empty cup every day of my 64 years, the one who has lifted my arms every time I could not, he’ll be there still.
Listen to what he says to us:
Even to your old age I will be the same,
And even to your graying years I will bear you!
I have done it, and I will carry you;
I will bear you and I will deliver you. (Isaiah 46:4)
Do you hear this? We are borne. We are carried. And we will be delivered. If we allow it.
(Dear ones, please don’t resist Him any longer. Let him carry you. All the way through
1. Please share this post (and its message of hope) on your social media and/or email list! (And when you share it, would you give it a few words of affirmation, so your friends are more likely to read it?)
2. Let me know you did that here in the comments, along with your email. (So I can contact you for your mailing address.)
3. Let me know if you would prefer a book or the ticket to the Wonder Years Gathering in Orlando, Feb. 26.
Thank you for sharing this space with me! Sending love and prayers that you’ll feel the arms of God beneath you.