Saturday, May 29, 2010

I am getting old!

I don't like the sound of that. My mother's brother, Jimmie, told me when I was little that old was fifteen years older that your are--at any time in your life. To a ten-year-old 25 is OLD. To a thirty-year-old you are really starting to get go down he other side of the hill at 45. When you are 75 you look at 90 as about as far as life will be an option. My mother may have disagreed with him, though I never heard heard her say anything about it. My father was 16 years older that she was, so maybe she was especially sensitive about the subject.

Neither my mother or my father attained my exalted age--73, so I have to look elsewhere for role models. My aunts and uncles endured into their late seventies and eighties, but I am looking to James Fowler and Erik Erikson's developmental stage theory for my inspiration. From that perspective you never get through growing and learning and maturing. Fowler says we lean into God's future, the coming Kingdom of God. Getting old does have some advantages: You never get through.

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