Aging with Grace?

It has been a very long time since I have written anything. A very long time since I felt I had something to say. The last words I wrote were before my mother died. Life at that point was difficult but to really express the level of difficult I have no words. My mother was a hard person to love. Life with her in prime health was hard but in her ill state she was impossible. She was dying slowly from COPD and made everyone around her pay for her misery. Taking care of her the last two years was stress overload and soul sucking. But I did my duty because God needed me too. Three days before her death, I got to lead her in a prayer to accept Jesus. That was my crowning glory for the stress endured by my soul. I paid a deep spiritual price for those years.

After she was gone I was empty. Void of anything left to give to anyone. I felt used up and found myself wandering in a wilderness. I couldn’t find the care I once had for everyone around me. I had nothing left to give. The emptiness was consuming.

I had left my home church before her death and was church shopping. Every church we visited wasn’t a fit. It seemed like I was just to old to be used in the ministry of a church any longer. So many rejections as the leaders were targeting a “younger demographic”. I was put out to pasture. You should “help” in the nursery or greet once a month. My gifting, my calling seemed to be irrelevant. What once had been my passion, my gift, wasn’t even considered to be a skill. I was the older generation and just not what they were looking for. My soul sunk deeper within and the little hope I had remaining was extinguished. I was useless to the church. I guess my time to be used by God is over. That’s what I thought.

So my husband and I purchased a lake property and did like all aging people do, prepared to retire and take life easier. But something was still missing. The hope I once felt. The fire I once had. The drive to see the lost be saved. It was always my driving force. With all life had dished out I found only emptiness where hope had lived.

A marriage that just can’t seem to thrive no matter how hard you pray or how much counseling is done. Twenty years of giving in a marriage until you just have nothing left. A husband that seems to not care enough to make the changes needed to repair the lost love. Empty nest and empty dreams. Children who are thriving and living their own lives but have little room for you. A business failing and stealing what was saved for old age. This is where life has brought me too.

Aging doesn’t seem graceful. It’s not an easy slide into retirement as pictured in the TV commercials. Its watching your own parents leave this earth. For many of us it making hard decisions about your own life. Will you just sit in a bad marriage and wait to die? If you’ve tried everything, do you just throw in the towel? Do you close the business you’ve spent your life cultivating? Do you start over at 64?

Don’t get me wrong. I love my family and friends. I love my children. I love God. But aging isn’t graceful. It’s hard decisions. Hard realities. Hard watching everything you made your life about mean nothing.

God is still here. I feel him. I know him. He hasn’t left me. I may not know much else but I do know my God is still in it with me. This too will pass. I find the lure of heaven so much closer to my heart these days. Hope does still reside within. It’s just harder to find and looks more like heaven now.