The Avoiders

"Wisdom belongs to the aged, and understanding to the old."

-Job 2:12

"Come near to the Lord and He will come near to you."

-James 4:8 

I have to tell you I'm not a super big fan of aging. It seems to get harder each day, more aches and pains, tired all the time, illness seems to abound. And then you start hearing it.  Just this week, I heard of two high school friends who are ill. One has cancer, and one has Parkinson's. Those are just two in a long line of people I know my age who are not doing well. I hate it.  You know the old saying, I wish I had known I was really going to get older, I would've taken better care of myself. Yep. Agreed.

There are a couple of other things that aren't great about aging. Losing weight seems to require eating one very small meal a day for year.   Or, you can be sick and go to the hospital. That will do it . When I do crossstitch, I have to use my mother-in-law's magnifying glass which I swore I'd never have to do. And fireball  here actually gets tired after a day of babysitting.  I used to be able to handle two kids, a husband, 25 kids at school, laundry, house cleaning, cooking........all of it in a day. And then I usually stayed up at night and worked on school stuff or my masters degree. That would kill me now.
Even at my "tender" age, there seems to be no end to the challenges.  Can't imagine what mom faced daily at 92......and she was pretty healthy.

Then there are the emotional changes.  Family is bigger, and so busy.  More people to love and be concerned about, but also much less contact or control with that family.  We are no longer a daily necessity to our kids.  Some of us are luckier than others, and have frequent contact with them.  Others go for seemingly endless periods of time without hearing from them.  Some struggle with purpose after a lifetime of devoting ourselves to our families and our jobs.

I used to be able to learn anything with a little work.  I was blessed with a quick mind ( accompanied by no common sense, but that's another issue).  Now, I have been working on memorizing the first 9 verses of  Philippians for weeks and STILL don't have it......thanks Pastor Wade for the encouragement to memorize a chapter, but not sure I'm gonna live THAT long!

There is one area of life, however, that gets BETTER with age....at least it certainly has for me and many of my friends.  Spiritually, I am a much different creature than I was when I was young.  It may be because of all our life experiences.  We have lived through a lot, seen a lot, and are painfully yet wonderfully aware of our daily need for Christ.  It could be a time factor.  Because I am not working full time, I have more time to spend with the Lord, which automatically enhances our relationship.  Or it could be because of the difficulties we face as we age.   Trials that happen to us drive us to our knees because there is just nowhere else to go.  Whatever the reason, many of us enjoy a deeper , more blessed relationship with Christ than we've ever had before.

Wouldn't it be great to be able to go back and be our younger selves, with all the advantages in our spiritual, mental, and emotional selves, and carry this spiritual wisdom into that time?   Of course we all have seen young people who have a great spiritual maturity, but most of us can look back and know we just didn't.  It just wasn't there.

I have just finished many months with Shauna Neiquist's book  'Present Over Perfect'.  I have quoted from her book many times on Facebook, because it spoke very deeply to the person I have always been.  In her chapter entitled 'Baptism' she writes about a person who seeks chaos.  As I have aged, I  have realized that was what I did as a younger person,  I know there are times I still behave this way.  I liked this chapter so well, I'm going to reproduce a bit of it here.  It's worth the read.

        " When I think about my life now, I think about Pigpen from 'Peanuts'  and how as Charles Schultz drew him, he was always surrounded by  a cloud of dirt and swirling dust.  I think that's how I 've lived for a long time without knowing it.  I thought that the noise and the chaos and the busyness were always somehow finding me, but I couldn't figure out how.  What are the chances, I thought?  Isn't this funny?
        But over time I started to realize that I'm like one of those girls who can't fiure out why drama always finds her.  She swears up and down she has nothing to do with it.  But then you watch her trash-talk one girl and flirt with another girl's boyfriend, and you realize that even if she doesn't see it, the drama is all her.
     The chaos is all me, as much as I don't want to admit it.  I create it, am drawn to it, kick it up when things get too quiet, because when I'm quiet I have to own up to the fact that quiet terrifies me, that all my life I've been wrapped up in dust and dirt.  And that noise protects me from feeling all the things I don't want to feel.......Addiction to motion - or faking or business or obsessive eating or obsessive dieting or whatever it is for you - builds just a tiny, luscious buffer between you and..... everything.  So words that would hurt you when you're stone-sober just don't bother you after a glass or two of wine, or after you've lost three more pounds, or as long as chocolate or pizza can keep you company, keeping you safe and distant.  But you take away those things and all of a sudden, you find many of your relationships very different than you originally believed.  You feel everything.  Everything.  It's like wearing glasses for the first time."

So as I look back, my "avoider" if you will was chaos.  But your avoider can be ANYTHING....anything that keeps you from developing the deep relationship with others and especially with God.  Anything that you use to buffer things in your life you don't want to address.  I bet we could make a very long list.

So aging does have its benefits.  When looking back as I can now, I can put those glasses on and see things in hindsight.  It's always 20-20, right?  I can also see many people I know using their own avoider techniques in their lives.  Many of the young adults today are following in my footsteps, being so busy they simply can't live a deeply meaningful life.  Of course technology is huge too.  Time devoted to social media is less time for God, family, and nurturing self.

I wish we could tell them.  I wish they would listen.  I wish I had listened when older, wiser people had tried to tell me.  I wish I could bottle up the relationship with Christ that time with Him gives me. One drop for each person who needs to experience it would probably be all it would take.  It's that sweet.

So the advantage I have when thinking about these lessons to learn for my family is prayer.  I have more time to pray.  Pray that the ones I love are earlier learners than I was.  Pray that they can find the sweet relationship with Christ that makes everything better before I did.  Pray that they might  run to Him with open arms.  So no matter what my aging issue, the thing I can ALWAYS do is the most effective.  You can too.  Pretty sure someone, somewhere prayed for us.  As older adults, lets not avoid the one area we can make the most impact.  Pray, Pray. And pray some more.