What of Old Age and the Beauty of God (Part 2)
“Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures.” (Psalm 90:10)
I was in a restaurant with a few of my much younger friends when the five-year old boy sitting next to me in the booth reached up, took a pinch of my sagging neck skin, and said, “Why are you old?” I paused and replied, “I’m not sure. I guess it’s because I was born a long time before you.”
If you read Part 1 (which I recommend), you’ll know that I turned that ominous seventy-year milestone (or millstone?). Since then, while nearing my expiration date, I’ve been increasingly reflective if not nostalgic about my time on earth and contemplating my mortality, being careful not to forget my morality. Oliver Wendell Holmes said that a lot of people “die with all their music in them.”
Wrinkles and worry lines are a daily reminder to keep the finish line in view and not leave the race before it’s over. Parker Palmer said, “Old is just another word for nothing left to lose, a time of life to take bigger risks on behalf of the common good.”
Question: What do you give a person who has everything?
Answer: Penicillin.
I have a 90-day supply of antibiotics on hand. Must be a sign I have pretty much everything these days. As a frequent flyer to the pharmacy, I’ve been given an honorary membership in their bonus savings plan. If I keep this up, they’ll have to start paying me to come and take product off their hands.
Psalm 90, the oldest of all of the Psalms, most likely written by the oldest writer of them all, is all about getting older and hopefully wiser. Moses sounds like he published his only Psalm while in his last days, the very last of which didn’t happen until he died at 120!
Most people don’t live that long nowadays. Definitely longer than I want to be wheezing and complaining myself. Moses, of course, was a special case. He had a special job to do, and as soon as he finished it some time before his 121st birthday, though still in pretty good health, God bade him to the mountain, put him to sleep, and buried him on the spot. No sad songs, twenty-one-gun salutes, or moving eulogies. Don’t look for his grave. It’s a secret, along with Noah’s ark. But you can read about it in Deuteronomy 32 and 34.
I can only speculate that his 70-or-80-years comment was a kind of natural course of things, typical longevity for most people. (About what it is for Americans these days. But again, Moses was “most people.”)
Moses was 40 when he killed his first Egyptian. Then he fled to the desert until God met him at the blazing bush when he was 80. He then wandered in the wilderness with his fellow Israelites and died at 120. (I don’t want to live that long myself.) I’ve always wondered if all of the spies had returned with a better report, if they would’ve entered the promised land when Moses was still a youthful lad of 80. But they didn’t and he wasn’t. He did, however, look back at some point and write this Psalm about the passage of time and the aging process.
Whether you’re an age-mate of mine or not, this Psalm has something for everyone. Everyone who is terminal that is. In light of such a disparity between God who is eternal (“everlasting to everlasting”) and us who are not, he prays: “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Notice wisdom is more in the heart than the head.His point is, we don’t have much time here, so we should get on with spending it in the best way we can.
Spurgeon cites an old preacher who said: “He that longs to look back with satisfaction upon past years, must learn to know the value of single minutes, and endeavor to let no particle of time fall useless to the ground.” In other words, what a pity it is that many people don’t realize the reason they were born until they’re ready to die.
Speaking of a pity, we still haven’t gotten to my favorite part of the Psalm about how all this relates to “the beauty of God.” Please stay tuned for one more piece on that. Maybe two…
