Facebook is a difficult place for people who graduated high school in 1984. There are a few of us who’ve aged well, but the rest, posting wrinkled mugs regularly on social media, haven’t fared as well.
I’m thankful that I don’t look that old. When I gaze into my morning mirror, I see no swimsuit model to be sure, but I look mostly like I always have.
But within pictures, this visage is somehow different, probably closer to reality.
Take my driver’s license for example: I look really, really old, like that geezer who cut my hair when I was a kid. Super scary. Our family Christmas pictures tell the same tale; a past-middle aged guy with greying hair and a couple of stowaways in the chin department.
I think the mirror might be lying.
In Loss, Truth?
A time is coming when nobody, including me, will argue that I’m old.
That’s a problem.
I’m a product/victim of western culture’s love of physical beauty. In my college days I exercised, watched what I ate, perseverated over fashion, and heard from time to time that I might be attractive.
That was a big deal. The pretty people made fun of me in Jr. High because I didn’t look right.
When a few people tell you that you’re pretty and you believe them, being pretty becomes way too important, a religion of sorts that supplants nearly everything else.
As I watch whatever beauty I possess sail off into the horizon, it’s depressing.
In our culture, you’re more likely to succeed in the workplace if you’re pretty. It’s easier to get a job in Hollywood, or politics, or ministry if you’re tall, fit, and fun to look at. I’ve seen (and perpetrated) this so many times as a church leader.
Right or wrong, it’s where we live. Beautiful people seem to have more value than everyone else. That sucks because a) not everybody’s pretty, and b) even the pretty people have to say goodbye, at some point, to pretty.
Some of us won’t let go. We’ll take whatever remaining hair and try to match the latest style with it, or cake on some extra makeup, or workout really hard and wear tight clothes – whatever we can perpetrate against ourselves and others in defense of our languishing loveliness.
Beauty isn’t a bad thing, by the way. If God’s responsible for it, it must be as important as anything else. It just seems cruel to give it to us then take it away.
So, God. Why?
If YOU preside over all of this, why is our deterioration so important? Why must we say a slow and painful goodbye to things like beauty, strength, and control?
If you communicate something important in everything you do, what are you trying to say?
Icabod
Years ago, I went up in a small trainer aircraft with one of my students, a 65-year-old Baptist minister from Hope, Arkansas.
We headed north to our practice area over Millwood Lake where I had him run through an exercise that involved pulling the throttle back to idle. When he finished, I asked him to return throttle to cruising speed, but it had somehow worked its way loose from the engine, now running at idle.
We were going down.
The first thing you’re supposed to do in that moment is pick a place to land, then try to fix the problem as you head to your intended spot. I looked down at the field below and couldn’t believe that we’d be landing in someone’s cow pasture.
It was hard to believe that this was real. For a moment I thought we might die.
But since we were at 5000 feet, and only losing about 500 feet per minute, and because there was nothing but cropland between us and a legitimate runway (15 miles away), we decided to pick a place to land that was between us and the airport. If we had enough altitude by the time we got there, we’d pick another field, working our way closer and closer to the airport, hopefully having enough altitude to land safely.
It worked.
We got the plane fixed and I had some time to think about our adventure on the short flight back to Texarkana. It’s weird to find yourself in a situation where you believe that you might die and there’s not much you can do about it.
Long ago, NASA did a study on cockpit voice recorders after a fatal crash. In each accident, the pilot(s) seemed to deny the situation.
One pilot, just before his plane hit the ground, said, “Mom?”
When our illusion of control suddenly disappears, we don’t do well. It’s almost as if our DNA can’t handle reality.
Getting old is much like a plane crash. You have a little time to think before you smack the dirt and there’s nothing you can do about it.
As the ground gets closer and closer, you get weirder and weirder. Then, boom.
Mom?
As our beauty fades and the realities of our fragile state come into focus, we’re forced to let go of illusions: Money, influence, big houses, pretty friends, shiny cars; garbage.
The ancient Hebrews had a word for this: אִיכָבוֹד (ʼīyḵāḇōḏ), used in the Old Testament to describe something pointless, worthless, thin, without glory.
Meaningless.
In this season of impending mummification, I’m reevaluating my devotion to meaningless, אִיכָבוֹד kinds of things, clearing the way for what’s really in my heart. As the dust settles from my youthful attempts to conquer the world, what’s left reminds of something that Jesus prayed on the night of his betrayal. He could’ve prayed for anything, but this seemed to be the most important thing:
Father, make them one as you and I are one.
Job Description for the (soon to be) Elderly
This season of letting go qualifies us past-middle-aged folk to do things that the young-hip-pretty folk will struggle to navigate.
I’m not saying that we’re better than young people. In any culture, you have to have some movers and shakers, the get-er-done, hell-bent-for-leather crowd. I hate that so many of them will chase meaningless things like I did, that marriages/families will suffer and folks will auction their happiness to the highest bidder.
It hurts to watch, but not everyone will suffer, and there is always some good that comes from this kind of zeal.
But a functioning world is also in dire need of people who’ve done all that, now focused on the value and weight of people, relationships, love, forgiveness, justice, reconciliation, etc. It’d be ideal if we could all manage to be movers and shakers while also valuing the deeper things, but we’re a bit frail for that I guess.
Either way, we geezers have a job to do, one that the younger folks tend to snub their noses at as often as they snub their noses at us.
The job is people: serving, helping, resourcing, giving, guiding, correcting (appropriately), and generally investing in the care and edification of humanity.
Nobody can do it like us.
It doesn’t matter that our culture doesn’t value us, that we’re too ugly and weak for them. It’s OK. Let the powerful, independent, self sufficient suckers have their time on the gerbil wheel.
When they fall off, we’ll be there.
Photo courtesy of Visual Stories || Micheile at Unsplash.com
