This week, I happened on two radio personalities – a man nearing 75, a woman pushing 25 – discussing the advantages and ravages of age. They talked about the odd gap that grows as we get older – that chasm between how we look and how we feel. The double take we so often give our aging selves, glancing into a mirror and trying – for just that half-second – to place the graying, thickening, jowly figure looking back at us.
It's a disconcerting phenomenon, and hard to explain to the young. One, ‘cuz we don’t want to explain it, since any discussion only underlines for others the fact that we’re getting older and they’re not. (They are, of course … but, two, given that it seems impossible for any of us – at any age – to imagine ourselves older than we already are, there’s little point making the effort.)
A character in my favorite book, The Friendly Persuasion, sums it up well when, as a man of four score years, he finds himself in awkward conversation with a wide-eyed little boy.
"Look old as God to him, I venture, Jess thought. Well, I can get back to him after a fashion, but he ain’t got no possible way of going forward to 80. And no way my telling him, I’m him, only considerably weather-beaten."
The man on the radio was assuring us that he holds no fear of death, despite the trepidations expressed by so many of his friends and relatives as they neared what Hamlet called “the undiscovered country.” More troublesome, the man asserted, are the inevitable infirmities of age, closing in … the gradual loss of energy, agility, acuity, independence.
The young woman, in response, brought up something an elderly friend had once suggested to her. Is it possible, she asked, that the pains, frailties, and embarrassments of old age are God’s way of stirring within us something none of us could imagine in our youthful exuberance and natural prime ... a genuine, growing desire to move on and see what’s “beyond the river?”
The man liked that idea – the thought of bearing arthritis and diminished hearing not as a curse, but as a nudge to make us, in the words of the old hymn, “long for heaven and home.” No one looks forward to having a tooth pulled, he said, until the misery of an aching bicuspid makes any reprieve – even a potentially painful one – seem attractive.
In thinking on this – why don’t we long for heaven more than we do? – I’ve come upon irony: we dread heaven for exactly the same reason we look forward to it.
It goes on forever. Which means we won’t die – hallelujah! And that things will just keep on … keeping on. And on. And on. And on. Ugh.
We want to see our lost loved ones. Walk streets of gold. See the places He’s prepared for us. On our better days – we even want to see our God, face to face. But you know how it goes with reunions: there’s only so much to say, so much to catch up on, before you’re ready to move on to something else.
Only, in heaven: what else? How many times can you sing “Amazing Grace?” How many times can you introduce yourself to the saints? How many times can you stroll those golden streets, just thankful for being there?
Well, a) a lot more than we think, if it comes to that. We’ll have a lot more to sing about, more saints than we’d guess, and more places to go with hearts overflowing than we can possibly conceive of now. We have the lovely promise of Scripture that, “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, Nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.” Our Lord’s imagination is so much greater than we … imagine.
“Heaven,” a wise fellow said, “will be at once a great eye-opener and a great mouth-shutter.”
But b), there’s another aspect we don’t often consider: how much time, this side of eternity, we spend wishing things wouldn’t change. We grouse all the time about technological reboots too fast to keep up with … phones and computers updated before you can walk out of the store; cars you can hardly drive without a pilot’s license. About that great old restaurant that closed down a few years back. About those beautiful acres they paved over to put up the new subdivision.
About the years, flying by.
We wish our children could stay young forever. That our parents could always be near and alert and alive. That beauty wouldn’t fade, and health wouldn’t ebb, and our hearts could always be full and happy. That quiet moments would linger on the evening breeze … that our friends could stay close by and laughing … that the dog would just keeping looking up at us with those big, adoring eyes … that the sunset could hang in the sky that way forever.
And on and on and on. If only all that is good and sweet and fun and restful – if everything that reminds us of the goodness of God and the glory of His creation and the small, tender mercies He continually breathes into our lives and souls and circumstances – could just fill some wondrous, perfect moment that somehow never, never ends.
There’s a word for that.
I was sitting at the bedside of my dear friend, Dale ... several years older and dying too young. He was drifting in and out of consciousness, stirring and restless. I was gazing on his familiar face, for what I knew was probably the last time, when suddenly his eyes shot open – wide and bright and looking past me, past the walls and even the sky outside – at something so marvelous he gasped with wonder.
“Oh!” he whispered, dazed and smiling. “It’s ... so ... beautiful.” He lay quietly for a moment, and then glanced, reluctantly, away from the vision and into my eyes.
“You don’t see it, do you?” he said, his voice, in that moment, strong again, and tinged with regret that we couldn’t share the wonders his face was straining forward with such excitement to see. “You don’t see it …”
His head fell back on the pillow, and his eyes closed once more … the skin around them wrinkling with a grin of contentment.
“But you will,” he said. “You will.”
To what Dale saw – on the far side of age, on the far side of pain, on the far side of all that we dread and imagine. To surprises well worth waiting for.
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