I was wondering the other day why some folks grow old gracefully, while others just get sour and unsociable. I think it's important to know why we get to be one way or the other because all of us are getting older every day.
Old age can be "good old age" or it can be very bad. Thomas á Kempis wrote, "Of what use is a long life if we amend it so little? Alas, a long life often adds to our sins rather than to our virtue."
In my opinion, the first half of life is a piece of cake; the hard part comes later as our strength begins to decline. It's then that the stuff of which we're made begins to show. People can mask their bad behavior better when they're younger. They have the energy to do so. But unfortunately, when old age sets in, they let it all hang out.
That's why some old folks become more irascible and impossible as they age. Those traits don't develop simply because they've gotten older. Certainly there are conditions that cause confusion and anxiety as men and women age, but nothing inheres in aging itself that necessarily impairs them morally and makes them mean. No, I think it's more that as they get older they just become what they've been becoming all along.
Paul had a word on the subject: "The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please (God) will reap eternal life" (Galatians 6:8).
Those who leave God out of their lives and who pander to self-interest are sowing seeds that in time will produce a harvest of misery in themselves and in others. On the other hand, those who seek to love God and by his grace to love others, are sowing seeds that yield a harvest of life. Every day they are becoming more alive than they ever were before.
C. S. Lewis put it this way:
"Every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. And taking your life as a whole with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature; either a creature that is in harmony with God and with other creatures and with itself or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God and with it's fellow creatures and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heavenly, i.e., it is joy and peace and knowledge and power; to be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence and loneliness. Each of us, at each moment, is progressing to the one state or the other."
Lord, what I once had done with youthful might,
Had I been from the first true to the truth,
Grant me, now old, to do with better sight.
David Roper
May 18, 1996