Shelburne faith column: What does 'old' mean to you?
A couple of years ago our local police asked for help in locating “a missing elderly woman with dementia.” Their alert went on to tell us the missing lady was 61. “Elderly?”
Fox News told us about a burglar who woke up “an older couple,” whom they later identified as “in their 60s.” I wonder how old that reporter is.
Journalists now seem to be consistent in calling anyone over seventy “elderly.” Maybe they are right, but I doubt they ever met Eddie Melin in his mid-nineties and still sharper than most who were half a century younger than he was.
Whether or not we are “old” depends on a lot more than the calendar. When I met one one of our nation’s top electrical engineers, he had just turned forty, but he fooled me. I thought he was “an old man” because he looked and acted like he was. Factor into my perception the fact that I had barely turned thirty. Every mature adult seems “old” to people that age.
Luke 2 chronicles the time when Joseph and Mary brought their infant son Jesus to the Temple. “The prophetess Anna was also there,” Luke says, “and she was very old. In her youth she had been married for seven years, but her husband died. And now she was eighty-four years old.” So am I. As Luke puts it, “very old.” But that didn’t sideline Anna. “Night and day she served God in the temple by praying and often going without eating.”
Getting old doesn’t mean you have to be idle or useless or bored.
Joe Barnett recently reminded us that “Joshua was eighty-five years old when God drafted him to lead a cantankerous crowd into the Promised Land.” Obviously, the Lord didn’t think Joshua was too old to be useful.
In his adventure novel "Past Tense," Lee Childs’ hero Jack Reacher goes to a rural nursing home to visit a relative in his nineties. Physically immobile, the old codger still is mentally clear and alert, but Childs says Reacher saw “an old man shuffle into view, stooped, gray, slow, unsteady.” That’s me.
Childs also caught my attention when he described nursing home visitors as “the prebereaved.” And he probably was right. Most care center patients have just about used up their years.
We old folks who are running out of calendar pages would be wise to use the remaining ones to faithfully serve and honor the God who allotted so many years to us.
Gene Shelburne is pastor emeritus of the Anna Street Church of Christ, 2310 Anna Street, Amarillo, Texas. Contact him at GeneShel@aol.com, or get his books and magazines at www.christianappeal.com. His column has run on the Faith page for more than three decades.
This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: Shelburne faith column: What does 'old' mean to you?
