Growing Old and Trusting God

She’s thin, white-haired and shuffling along in the grocery store where I shop. She used to lead the ladies’ group at a church my wife and I attended.

“How are you?” I ask, pushing my cart alongside her as she makes her way to checkout, where her husband, a World War II veteran who worked as an executive for a large corporation, waits.

They’re originally from the North, and both are longtime retired. Her voice is cheerful as she greets me by name and says, “Oh, pretty well.”

“You’re looking sharp,” I say. Her black blouse and slacks accentuate her fair skin and white hair. Her dark clothing seems New York-ish, classic.

“You know what Restless Leg Syndrome is?” she asks.

“I’ve heard about it,” I say. “What are its effects?”

“Oh, it makes you want to go…,” she says, swiftly moving both arms from her sides to 45-degree angles. She can’t seem to think of an appropriate word. I want to finish her sentence with “zoom,” but I don’t.

“I know that’s tough,” I say, recalling that she, a lady known for her Christian faith, also wrestled for years with back problems.

“Sometimes I get a couple of hours of sleep,” she says. “The days are long, and the nights are longer.”

I wonder how getting only snatches of sleep for months might affect a person. I make a few consoling comments, and my friend moves on to join her husband. I process through checkout and catch up with them before they reach their car. We exchange more pleasantries, and as I watch them drive away, I recall that a minister once told me, “Those years they call ‘The Golden Years’? Well, there’s a lot of brass in those years.”

Last year, I attended a Greer High School Class of 1965 reunion in Greer, S.C., and collected some e-mail addresses. I recently sent one of my articles, “Grace Comes When Needed,” to a few former classmates and received this note from one of those friends, Martha Satterfield Brown, a nurse:

“Dear Steve, I just wanted to thank you…I sent this (article) to my college roommate who has just finished her first week of six (weeks of treatments) of chemo…I know she will enjoy this because her faith is so strong and she already realizes that she is truly blessed to have found this cancer early. Her treatment will change her life and body image forever, but we are hopeful that her life will be spared…

“I have 37 days left till retirement and I am so excited…I am so ready to be home to do things with my husband. He retired 10 years ago with heart problems, and we want to do things besides go to the doctor and stay places other than the hospital.”

A minister friend, the father of three adult children, recently e-mailed, thanking my wife Carol for some cards and letters she sent to his wife who will soon begin radiation treatments. “Thank you for your prayers and support,” he added.

Getting older may not be a walk in the park or a Sunday school picnic, to use “old” expressions.

Jesus said to Peter, “When you were young, you girded (clothed) yourself and walked where you wished; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go” (John 21: 18).

Someone said, “In addition to referring to the death that Peter would die, that statement has an eerie application to the life of many older people and the passivity or passion that they embrace in their later years.”

The Psalmist writes in Psalm 71: “In Thee, O Lord, do I take refuge…Do not cast me off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength is spent…I will hope continually and will yet praise Thee more and more…I will go in the strength of the Lord…O God, thou has taught me from my youth…Now also when I am old and grayheaded, O God, forsake me not.”

“For he (the Lord) said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you’” (Hebrews 13:5).