Chapter Thirteen

On Aging and the Family

My son Samuel, about three years old, at the time, wanted to have a theological conversation with me, and I’m afraid I didn’t have the courage for it. Samuel carried around with him a ragged little stuffed toy baby owl, dirt stains clinging to its frayed cloth. He called his baby owl “Pengui,” mistaking the bird for a penguin. We never corrected him, because who wants to debate ornithology with a toddler? This toy had been Samuel’s constant companion since he was in the crib. The softness of the toy seemed to comfort him, as he would often rub Pengui up against his cheek when he was calming down after crying.

On this day, we had been the ones crying, after the death of someone close to our family. Hearing us talk about dying, Samuel started asking questions about death. I answered them all, confidently, from the Bible. I can still re-imagine what it was like to see those little brown eyes darting along as I talked about the promise of resurrection for all who trust Jesus, and I can still see what it was like to notice that they were suddenly filled with tears. “Daddy,” he said, “if I go to heaven, can I take Pengui with me?” I sat still, my thoughts jogging ahead of me, trying to find a way to answer this without traumatizing my little son over, of all things, heaven. The idea of missing Pengui on a road trip sounded hellish to Samuel, much less for all of eternity. Finally I said, “Well, Samuel, heaven is perfect happiness in the presence of God. If, in the world to come, God knows that having Pengui with you will make you happy, then I am sure Pengui will be there.”

I looked at my wife, with a wink, as if to say, “This is how you do it.” An hour or so later, though, Samuel handed me a sheet of paper with scrawled pictures on it. The paper looked a lot like the “lists” he would give us for birthday or Christmas presents he wanted, I thought. And I was almost right. “What’s this?” I asked, with the sort of sing-song voice a father gives to a child when he’s been handed an art project. Samuel said, “Those are all the toys at the store that I also want to take to heaven with me when I die.” I could hardly think of the words to say. Later that night, I lay awake in the bed, and said to my wife, “Do you realize what a failure I am as both a father and as a theologian? I basically lied to my son about the eschaton, and simultaneously taught him to store up on earth the treasures he wants to take to heaven. That’s the exact opposite of what Jesus taught. That means that, in terms of parenting, I am literally anti-Christ.” Maria laughed, and said that I should wash the imaginary “666” from my forehead. But I still slept uneasily, knowing that for all my self-image as a man of gospel courage, my Christian conviction couldn’t stand up to a toy owlet.

What bothered me the most was not whatever confusing theology I had communicated. That would be gone from memory soon enough. What troubled me was that I had used Christianity, not in terms of bearing witness to the truth, but to quiet the questions of a little one. That may seem trifling, and yet this was the very point at which, as an adolescent, I had experienced a spiritual crisis of faith. As a teenager, I was looking around at the Bible-Belt cultural Christianity around me, and I started to wonder if anyone really believed this at all, or if the Christian faith I heard constantly preached and quoted was really just a prop for southern culture or conservative politics.

One of the things that provoked this crisis in me was the fact that I had recently been to several funerals. At these funerals, several times I saw in the casket at the front of the church a person I had never actually seen at church, whom I knew to be notorious for womanizing or drunkenness or just meanness to those around him. But despite all of this, at these funerals, everyone would say, though, as predictable as could be, “He’s in a better place.” or “He’s with Jesus now.” This was confusing. At every Sunday morning altar call, we were hellfire-and-brimstone revivalists. At every funeral, we were universalists. It was as though we believed in justification by embalming alone. I would slowly realize that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t believe what my neighbors were saying about the spiritual state of the deceased. They didn’t believe it either. For them, these words of heaven and everlasting life were, at least at a funeral, just the sorts of things one was expected to say to the survivors, right along with “Doesn’t he look natural?” and “If you need anything at all, call me.” Christianity was a means to an end. I lived through that dark night of the soul and found Jesus on the other side. But here I was with my toddler, doing the same thing—trying to find a gospel useful enough to help him make it through the night.

* * * *

Over every conversation about the gospel, really every conversation about anything, looms the shadow of death. How do we make sense of our lives, if, in fact, we are going to age and wither and die? That’s especially true when, as we are faced with mortality, we do precisely what a toddler would do: cling to our comforting toys all the more. “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth,” Paul wrote to the church at Colossae. “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:2–3). To convince myself that I am invulnerable and immortal, I too often grasp onto my financial stability or my family tranquility or my career success to keep my focus away from the fact that everything around me is transient and temporal, an evaporating mist. That reality has everything to do with the family—including the way we care for the aged among us, the way we drift onward into elderliness ourselves.

The difficulty in talking about the family as a way of carrying our crosses is that we might assume that “The Family” is one, static reality. By that I am not just referring to the differences between families and between the way families are structured in this fallen age. I mean that the family—our family and our place in it—changes over the span of our life cycle, sometimes in ways that can disorient us. If we pay attention, though, we can see that such changes can remind us—wherever we are in our lives—of our callings in the present, and our callings to a life beyond the veil of death.

To some degree, this is easiest when it comes to seeing the transitions from childhood to adulthood. We recognize as we mature, that the adults around us like to constantly, it seems, marvel at “how fast you’re growing” or say things along the lines of, “Last time I saw you, you were just a baby! Look how big you are!” When we are children, we cannot imagine why time seems to have passed so quickly for adults when it seems to crawl by for us. Those of us who have children of our own will notice that older people will say to us, when our babies are still young, “Enjoy every minute; it goes by so fast.” This seems to us like just another cliché, but in time we learn that, like most clichés, it has become a truism because it is true. We step back and wonder, “Where did this woman come from? She was my little girl just yesterday!” or “How did he suddenly become this man? Where is my little boy?” At the same time, we see those around us, our parents and our grandparents and our in-laws, moving a step or two ahead of us in the lifespan. We tend to largely ignore this until we see them start to stumble and to fall into decline. Then, we move both into the strain and stress of caring for those who have always been the ones to care for us, and in this we are reminded of what awaits us too: aging toward mortality.

Some studies suggest that the “forties” are the most difficult period of time for most people. Some scientists speak of a “U-turn” in terms of personal happiness, which is high in our twenties and into our thirties, then plummets at midlife, before, sometime in our fifties, spiking upward again. Some have suggested that this is because, at midlife, we start to see that what we hoped and planned for ourselves isn’t going to happen the way we might have imagined it. Others, though, suggest that this is due to the inordinate stress that comes on people when, as many must do, they are simultaneously parenting their children and dealing with the problems that come with aging parents. What we are dealing with here is the encroachment of death. We notice this perhaps when our mother starts to forget things or when our father falls and breaks a hip in the shower, but, in truth, we are being prepared by our extended family, all along, for the process of aging, even before we recognize it.

Extended families are themselves a sign of both life and death. If you are married, take a minute to look at a photograph from your wedding. Chances are, standing there will not only be your spouse, but your parents along with his or her parents. If you are not married, do the same with some other milestone picture (graduation celebration, birthday party, etc.). There will be, most probably, multiple generations of family members around you. If you are like me, you might stop and calculate how old those family members were then. My parents seemed so old to me when I graduated high school, and when I married. When I look at those pictures, though, I am looking into young faces—and I realize that, though I feel internally the same as I did at nineteen, just with some emotional scars and lessons learned along the way—I am older now than they were then.

Thinking about this recently, I realized that in the amount of time between the age my parents were at my wedding and the age they are now, I will be retired. That time span seems like nothing, and yet in the same amount of time, I will be finished with what seems so massively important to me now, moving quickly toward the span of years the psalmist tells us we can, at best, expect: “For all our days pass away under your wrath; we bring our years to an end like a sigh. The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away” (Ps. 90:9–10). There are many ways that God has signaled to us that we are not ultimate, that we came from somewhere and we will, sooner than we think, return to the earth. One of those ways is by putting us in not just nuclear families of a peer-spouse and perhaps children, but in extended families, with people all across the spectrum of generations. We can see, if we choose to see, something of what it takes to mature, and we can see, if we choose to see, what awaits us in the fullness of time.

In some ways, the three- or four-generational family is in jeopardy. In a globalizing, increasingly mobile society there are rarely those who know their grandparents or other extended family members in the way that previous generations would have. Some families don’t have grandparents and in-laws around in the same way because those figures have had to step in, often heroically, as parents. I cannot count how many faithful grandparents I know who are rearing their grandchildren in their homes (and in one case, their great-grandchildren). Sometimes this is because of a disability on the part of the child’s parents, or because the parents have been killed. Sometimes this is because a parent abandoned the children, or is imprisoned, or is addicted to substances that render that parent incapable of caring for his child. In other cases, though, we simply live spread out across multiple counties or states or even time zones from extended family.

I noticed this phenomenon in my own life when, coming home from Christmas in my hometown, I noticed that my children seemed listless and depressed. They had spent over a week with their grandparents (whom they adore) running through the woods there at the home in which I grew up in Biloxi, Mississippi. They fished in the pond behind my parents’ house and, like I did, spent hours exploring Pirates’ Alley and eating hot beignets at Café du Monde in New Orleans. The atmosphere in the car on the way home, as we drove almost twelve hours, was funereal, not because a vacation was ending but because they were leaving their grandparents behind, for who knows how long.

I cannot say that I understand how they felt. My grandmother lived right next door, as I was growing up. My other set of grandparents lived not far away, and I would spend endless hours with them, walking down the beach near our home or camping on a creek bank somewhere in the woods or riding roller coasters at a state fair or a theme park. At Christmas, my grandparents would carry out the exact same rituals every time. My grandfather would be at the stove cooking oyster stew, and, when opening his presents, always shirts, he would put each shirt on, one on top of the other. Most of my days in “ordinary time” were spent with my grandmother, picking purple hull peas in her garden or harvesting dewberries or, of course, riding back and forth to church. My children know their grandparents, but they don’t have that day-by-day experience. Fewer and fewer children do.

The Western industrialized world has changed from the way almost every previous culture knew it to be: agrarian hamlets with extended tribes working the same land as their fathers and mothers, and grandfathers and grandmothers. There’s no easy fix to this. One cannot will away such changes. One can, though, know what it is that we have lost, and endeavor to find ways to ameliorate this.

A church I know has a ministry unlike any I have seen. The ministry is designed to serve women who work in a nearby strip club. And it works well because of how many times it has failed. The church initially sent women who were roughly the same age as the women who worked in these clubs, and the project was a debacle. The strippers assumed that these women, their own age, would think they were “better than us,” since these would-be ministers were middle-class women living “respectable” lives. The next stage was an even worse disaster. The church trained and equipped older women to enter the strip clubs and build relationships, to evangelize and to serve. The strippers had negative reactions to most of these women because the women reminded them of their mothers, mothers with whom most of them had, at best, conflicted relationships. Even still, the church commendably did not give up on their mission field and sent a third cohort of women who were even older, and the ministry flourished. The women working in the strip club, some of them also prostituted out by predatory pimps, would confide in these old church ladies. The elderly women became their friends. Some of the strippers came to know Christ through their witness. Many more were given an exit route from the trafficking of the sex industry. The church leaders told me, “We saw a change when we sent in women who were not the age of the strippers’ mothers, but the ages of their grandmothers. Almost all of them had conflict with their mothers, but they all loved and missed a grandmother. They felt as though a surrogate mother would judge them, but never a surrogate grandmother.” There’s much wisdom there. This is not simply true of those who dance nude for a living, but, to some degree, for almost all of us.

* * * *

There’s a reason why parents and children, even in the best of situations, will have a certain degree of friction. Parents, after all, are given primary responsibility for the “nurture and admonition” of their children in the Lord (Eph. 6:4 kjv). Those who would suggest that we have overemphasized the nuclear family and underemphasized the extended family in our contemporary Western culture are quite right. The families of the biblical world—as the families of virtually every premodern culture—were extended and multigenerational. Calculating dates from the Bible is not a straightforward task since the language “son of . . .” in Scripture does not always mean, literally, the son of a father but the descendant of an ancestor. Jesus, for instance, is called the “son of Joseph” (John 6:42), but also the “son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matt. 1:1). That said, the Bible does make a clear distinction between the mother-father-child dynamic and that of the larger family just as it makes a clear distinction between the larger family and the tribe or the nation. As one Old Testament theologian puts it, the biblical family is not a “dormitory with double-beds.”63

Parents often marvel at how much more lax their parents are when it comes to a grandchild’s misbehavior than they were with them when they were children. This is natural. The grandparents, after all, are not immediately responsible for discipline, and so can relate to their grandchildren in a different way, leaving the parents to be stricter on them. When I was a young father, I assumed that much of this relaxed grand-parenting mode came from the exhaustion of age or of being out of touch with the day-to-day needs of childrearing. I suppose that is true in some cases and in some ways, but it is probably more true that age and experience teach one how to better differentiate between immaturity and disobedience.

I knew a mother who was panicked at the fact that her child was still wetting the bed at the age of eight or nine, frantically casting about as to what to do. The child’s grandmother said, “Why don’t you talk to an adult who lives with the issue of bedwetting?” The mother said she didn’t know anyone like that, who didn’t face some other medical disability, to which the grandmother replied, “Exactly. He will grow out of it, sooner or later. Relax.” Could grandparents be too relaxed? Of course. That’s why many of them, when called upon to be primary caregiver, shift from that mode to “parent” mode almost immediately. A child, though, needs both—someone who must give immediate personal account, a parent, for one’s formation and correction and a family member who is related just as closely by affection but more loosely by responsibility. We need this, in fact, not just in our families by nature, but also in our family by grace, the church.

A common saying in my Baptist tradition is, “God has no grandchildren.” What is meant by this saying is just another way of saying, “You must be born again” (John 3:7), that each person must come to faith in Christ and become thereby a child of God. One cannot be justified by God on account of his or her family legacy—because he or she was reared in a Christian family—if that person rejects, personally, the gospel. Those in other traditions would, I’m sure, not use that exact same language. But whether we would say that God has grandchildren, we do, in fact, need grandparents within the body of Christ. We need those mentors who can “parent” us—who can be involved close in, nurturing us through periods of doubt and rebuking us in periods of sin. But we also need those even older in the faith, those who might not be as personally involved with us, but who can love us and serve as mentors and role models. Our “mothers and fathers” in the faith often serve the exact same role as natural mothers and fathers—preparing us for life in Christ. Our “grandfathers and grandmothers” in the faith often do the same as our natural grandparents, telling us to stop worrying so much, to relax in the joy of the Lord, to grow old without bitterness or regret. We need both.

Moreover, the grandparent vocation is distinct and unique not only because of differing levels of responsibility, but also because a person usually finds his or her identity in relation to, and in some ways against, his or her mother or father. Years ago, I heard an elderly former government official saying in an interview what he had learned in the course of his career. One of those things was to never trust a politician who is a “junior” but who does not use the “junior” on his campaign signs. Such a person has too large an ego to serve, the elderly man said, since he is essentially asking the world to forget that he shares his father’s name. I suppose that could sometimes be the case, but probably not usually. Most people who don’t use the word “junior”—in whatever occupation—are simply trying to forge their own identity, to be their own person. In reality, that’s true of all of us, whether we are officially “juniors” or not. The child grows to maturity partly by seeing where he or she starts and where his or her parents’ identities leave off. This is an important part of the growth process, and one that, if short-circuited, can have serious consequences both on our flourishing and on our spiritual pilgrimages.

Often I will hear from young couples—usually young husbands—complaining about their in-law difficulties or about their own parents or extended families. Maybe they’re a young couple whose parents or grandparents don’t exactly approve of the way they are rearing their children, and would like to tell them all about how to do it better. Or, maybe they are new parents trying to discern how to teach transcendent priorities when every Christmas is Mammonpalooza at Aunt Judie’s house.

Now, tension takes place whenever finite and sinful people come into contact with one another. Someone asks, “When is the baby due?” to an unpregnant woman, or somebody blasts one’s favorite political figure . . . or, well, the examples can go on and on. Living in an extended family can be chaotic and confusing. Sometimes those grousing about the undue interference of parents or in-laws are wrongly maintaining a “no one can tell me what to do” sort of refusal of any counsel, including wise counsel. Some of the wisest advice we see in Scripture, after all, is not only the counsel of father to son throughout the book of Proverbs but that of Jethro to his son-in-law Moses, about the fact that Moses’ responsibilities were too great to bear alone and that he should delegate some of this burden to others (Exod. 18:1–27). “So Moses listened to the voice of his father-in-law and did all that he had said,” the Scripture tells us, commending the prophet for his reliance on the wisdom of his wife’s family (Exod. 18:24). It takes discernment to tell the difference between one’s indolence in refusing to take advice and one’s indolence in refusing to lead one’s own home instead of outsourcing that to whomever seems the most opinionated at the moment.

This is especially true, though, when the lines between childhood and adulthood become blurred. I’ve had young men tell me they feel like children when they go home to see their extended families. Their parents or parents-in-law dictate to them where to go, and for how much time. They highjack the rearing of their children (“Oh, come on! He can watch this one horror film! Don’t be so strict!”). Some of these men just give in, and seethe in frustration. While there may be legitimate battles to fight here (“No, little Caleb is not watching the horror film with you.”), sometimes the extended family treats the grown person as a child because that’s how he or she acts the rest of the year. Sometimes this is attributed to the ongoing dependence of the (grown) child on the rest of the family, either emotionally or (far more commonly) financially.

This is why the Bible calls on one to leave father and mother, and to cleave to one’s spouse (Gen. 2:24). Sometimes extended families interfere inordinately in their adult children’s lives because they are controlling and meddling. In those cases, they should be gently rebuffed. In other cases, though, they interfere because they have not made the transition from seeing their child as a child to seeing their child as an adult. Often, this is because the child, and his or her family are still financially dependent on their parents, long after establishing his or her own household. There are, of course, reasons why this might be the case. A daughter may have a husband who has left, or a son may have been diagnosed suddenly with cancer. There could be a catastrophe where the in-laws become the primary support for a time. Sometimes, though, the young married couple simply start out taking financial subsidies from one set of parents or the other in order to live at the same level to which they are accustomed—that is, to the level at which their parents lived. Except in the case, though, of inherited wealth, very few parents of grown children lived as well as they do now when they were starting out their lives. Whatever their income and quality of life is now, it typically took years to achieve. Instead of expecting this immediately, the young new household should see the “lean years” together not as deprivation but as an adventure.

This is not the case, obviously, when there is real jeopardy of not having the means for the necessities of food or clothing or shelter or healthcare, but often the largest conflicts I see are not in those dire circumstances. Almost inevitably, the grown children who are subsidized by parents or in-laws will find the same dynamic at work as a church ministry that is subsidized by the state. Initially, this church group will say to themselves, “Just think of what we could do with our gospel-centered recovery ministry to addicts, if we could apply for government grants.” When this happens, though, the state will almost always want the church to comply with its demands: to see to it, for instance, that sharing the gospel is not part of the recovery ministry, pulling out from it the very thing that was key to the ministry’s success in the first place. “If you don’t want Caesar’s meddling,” I will usually say to these churches, “Don’t take Caesar’s coin.”

The same is true, almost always, with extended families. More often than not, as one makes decisions, follows though on them, and provides for a household, the extended family will come, maybe gradually, to see that they need not worry about constantly looking about for where to place the safety net. They will no longer worry as much about whether “our little boy” or “our little girl” will be alright, because they will gradually come to see that this is not, in fact, a “little boy” or a “little girl” but a responsible man or woman, leading a household.

This “leaving/cleaving” dynamic is true not only financially but also emotionally. Many marriages are strained because a husband or wife finds in a mother or father the primary source of counsel. This is good and right in most cases. We all need outside direction, and a parent, older and wiser, is often the right place to find this. The exception comes in the matter of “venting” about one’s grievances or fears about a spouse. Rare is the mother or father who can keep objectivity about how he or she sees the son- or daughter-in-law in such a case. A son might tell his mother that his wife is flirtatious with other men, that he cannot take how she is headed toward an affair. He might then have a conversation with his wife, resolve a misunderstanding and never think anything more of it, while his mother worries about when she will hear that her son has been left for another man. Likewise, a daughter might tell her father that her husband never listens to her, that he is cold and inhuman. She and her husband might then fight and reconcile, with the husband repenting of his insensitivity and the wife apologizing for her anger. The wife may then forget all about the kerfuffle while her father does not. Leaving and cleaving means that certain boundaries are maintained, and that one’s parents are not (again, except in extraordinary circumstances) the default source of comfort and help instead of one’s spouse.

Leaving and cleaving does not, though, mean what is commonly practiced in modern Western society, where a nuclear family remains in an almost impermeable silo from the family of origin. This becomes especially relevant as extended family members age and, as is often the case, falter toward death. With longer lifespans due to modern medicine comes with it the expectation that more care will be needed, for longer periods of time, of parents and grandparents by their children. The Scripture commands us, included in the ten words with which God summarized his moral law to his people, “honor your father and your mother” (Exod. 20:12). As we have seen, the apostle Paul referenced this command in the context of children with their parents within the home (Eph. 6:1–2), but this is because childhood is where we first learn to honor our parents, not because honoring of father and mother concludes with adulthood. As a matter of fact, most of the biblical direction for honoring father and mother is not about small children at all, but to adults about their elderly parents. Moreover, most of this is not so much about an emotional expression of gratitude (although that is, of course, part of it) as it is in terms of what we might call economics. A child is to care for the parents who cared for him.

* * * *

Years ago, I was speaking at an event on a university campus devoted to the topic of “the sanctity of human life.” I spent my time talking about the protection of children—the unborn, orphans, and other vulnerable little ones, with some parenthetical references about human dignity in the opposition of euthanasia.

After me, though, was a Middle-Eastern immigrant woman, who spent most of her time talking about the need to not grumble when changing the diapers of one’s aged, infirm parents, but to remember that they changed one’s diapers years before. I was thinking, rightly, about the sanctity of human life in terms of the most basic prohibitions against killing another person. My colleague—shaped in a culture much closer in this particular respect to that of the Bible—concentrated also on the need for one generation to physically and economically care for the next, and to do so practically and without grumbling. I was chastened by this.

If we are a people of the cross, this means that the gospel addresses our breaking of the law at every point—including that of honoring father and mother. If Jesus died for something, we cannot see such things as trifling matters or as nuisances to be resolved. As I mentioned earlier in this book, Jesus was careful to keep this law on our behalf even from the cross itself, as he made arrangements for the care of his mother (John 19:26–27). And Jesus charged the religious leaders with breaking the commandment of God because, in their zeal to maintain their external display of religiosity, they ignored the care of their aged parents. “For God commanded, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die,’” Jesus thundered. “But you say, ‘If anyone tells his father or his mother, ‘What you would have gained from me is given to God,” he need not honor his father.’ So for the sake of your tradition you have made void the word of God” (Matt. 15:4–6). These are sharp words. Jesus accused these scribes and Pharisees of doing an almost reverse-Sermon on the Mount. In the Sermon, Jesus would quote a commandment from the Law, followed by, “but I say to you.” Jesus, though, intensified each commandment, showing how the commandment interrogated us internally as well as externally. These religious leaders, though, were saying, “but I say to you” while deescalating the demands of God’s law, and, even worse, doing so without authority and under the pretense of service to God. We rarely ignore our elderly under such biblical gymnastics, but we often assume that what is most important are our own careers and families, sometimes at the expense of those to whom our very lives are indebted.

The Scripture, though, calls not only on children to care for their parents, but on the church to care for its elderly members. James wrote, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before the God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” (James 1:27). James, the brother of our Lord Jesus, had seen this care for the most vulnerable among us, orphaned children and widowed women, up close. Joseph, after all, took into his own family a vulnerable child and a vulnerable woman: the refugee Jesus, on the run from the edict of Herod to murder all such children, and Mary, a woman pregnant outside of wedlock (Matt. 1:18–2:23). The New Testament apostles, almost immediately after the formation of the young church, gave direction as to how to provide not only for the widows among them, but the widows who were Gentiles and thus likely to be forgotten in a largely Jewish church (Acts 6:1–7).

The apostle Paul likewise detailed provisions to Timothy for how the church should provide for the widows among them (1 Tim. 5:3–16). Paul told Timothy that the one who will not “provide his relatives, and especially for members of his household” has “denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim. 5:8). I have heard this preached in reference to a man who would abandon his wife and children, leaving them to fend for themselves. This is, of course, applicable, but the reference goes far beyond just that. The immediate context is that of widows. A household is responsible for its relatives, not only as a matter of social order but because to do otherwise is worse than apostasy, the apostle contended. Nor does the apostle treat these widows as merely a personal, family responsibility. Those who do not have families, or who do not have families who will care for them, are not forgotten but have provision made for them by the church. This is, of course, consistent with God who, from the beginning of the canon, made provision in the structure of the economy of Israel for those who were widows and aged (Lev. 19:9; 23:22; Ruth 2:3, 17).

In our era, there are nursing homes and eldercare facilities filled with elderly people whose children have forgotten them, save perhaps to pay for their care. The situation is even worse for the elderly poor who are often destitute and without anyone to even remember them, much less care for them. The biblical call to honor mother and father does not mean that a family should not seek institutionalized care for an elderly loved one. I knew a man whose mother once told him to promise her two things: that he would never put her in a nursing home and that he would never put a “vault” around her casket when she died. She couldn’t stand the thought of a nursing home, and the idea of a vault was awful because, “Honey, I would smother to death.” The son said, “Mother, if you’re smothering in there, something has gone terribly wrong in the first place.” He refused to make those promises, and he was wise in this refusal. In many cases, those who keep an elderly relative or friend at home, when they are not able to adequately provide medical or other care for this person, are actually harming, not honoring, the elder. What this does mean, though, is that we cannot outsource the care of our elderly to some third party. A person’s needs are not simply medical. A person needs affection and conversation and spiritual encouragement—the very same things one needs in every other stage of life. To allow an elderly person to languish in an institution alone, or, for that matter, to leave an elderly person alone in his or her home, without connection to others, to the Word of God and to the Lord’s Table, is not just cruel but a repudiation of the gospel itself.

In some ways, the market-driven nature of the church in our era prepares us to abandon our elderly long before they are incapacitated. Increasingly, our churches are oriented, by music and by culture, toward one generation or the other. Older congregations signal in a multitude of ways—hymns chosen, traditions followed, even graphic design—that younger people are not wanted. Younger congregations do the same, in the same ways as well as with, for instance, the volume of the music in the service. Sometimes these tensions between generations will be inevitable and relatively innocuous, but when the old signal to the young, or the young to the old, “We do not need you,” we are putting asunder what God has put together. The great crisis of the church in the next era may well be this: how do we share a common ministry to one another when we do not share a common hymnody with one another? Long before we put the elderly out of our sight in dark apartments or hospital rooms, we put them out of our sight in worship services and mission trips. Some congregations are, as I mentioned elsewhere, gerontocracies in which the older generations prize their nostalgic reenactments of the past more than they do the next generation. Those congregations or denominations will die. But we cannot make the opposite error—of congregations for whom the very sight of elderly people, in leadership or even at all, is seen as “off-brand.” When that happens, we are well on our way to doing exactly what Jesus warned us about: devouring widows’ houses even while we pray our long prayers (Mark 12:40; Luke 20:47).

* * * *

The changes in the life cycle are even seen in the way we think of the future, of eternal life itself. For years, I have spent time—along with many others—calling people away from the idea of heaven as the idle staring into a timeless light. If we are honest, I will often say, many of us secretly find the idea of heaven boring—a static existence for time without end. In reality, though, I have argued, the Bible does not speak of our future this way. We do not have an “afterlife”—as though our life now is our “life” and what follows is “after.” We have instead the Christian hope of the resurrection of the body. What we have waiting for us is not an ethereal heaven but a joining of heaven to earth—a new creation. And with that comes an ongoing mission. The “crowns” we receive at judgment are not ornamental but signs of governing authority. Our eternal life is active—we will be reigning with Christ, judging angels (1 Cor. 6; 2–3; Rev. 20:6). “Rest,” biblically defined, I will say, does not mean a cessation of activity but a clearing-away of enemies and obstacles (1 Kings 5:3–4; Heb. 4:1–13). I believe all of that now more than ever.

I often, though, think of what I learned from an older theologian—one who shares with me a new creation eschatology—about how, for him, he no longer dismisses the concept of heaven in terms of a cessation of activity, of “rest” in the classic sense, centered upon the Beatific Vision of God. He said that the idea of eternity as activity invigorated him when he was young, but the older he became the more he looked forward to tranquility, the less he looked forward to the adventure of whatever was to come in the hereafter and the more he looked forward to resting in peace. In fact, the Bible speaks of the life to come both in terms of tranquility and activity, of continuity and discontinuity. It is probably so that the elderly Christian who feels tired of life and wants merely to rest is acting not out of theological ignorance but out of the same natural longing that a traveler on a long journey would look forward to falling into bed and sleeping. After the sleep, though, the traveler is rejuvenated, ready for the next mission from his Lord.

It could be that we need both emphases. The tired, elderly Christian needs to be reminded, “Your work is not over. There is abundant life to come, with all that entails!” And, at the same time, the young, busy Christian needs to be reminded that activity itself does not equal life and that the Sabbath rest that awaits us should call us to “Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10). This is especially true when, as the poet David Whyte remarked, we often see one another through the “blurred vision of velocity,” in which we lose sight of anyone going at a slower pace than we are. This means, he rightly says, that we lose sight of those who are sick, those who are elderly, those who are children, and even “the parts of our own selves that limp a little, the vulnerabilities that actually give us color and character.”64 Eternity before us should remind us that a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his schedule. As long as we do not grasp this, we will continue to see the aged and the elderly as merely burdens to bear, not as what they are: future rulers of the universe, joint-heirs with Christ, in the embryo of elderliness.

To be sure, caring for elderly parents or grandparents or mentors can be taxing and trying. I saw my own grandmother harried as she cared, in her home, for her own mother, my great-grandmother, who lived to well over one hundred years old. She would not only attend to my great-grandmother all day but would then be awakened in the night by the elderly woman yelling loudly, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I give you my heart and my soul!” (this was the Catholic side of my family). My grandmother would gently ask her to keep her voice down so she could sleep. When we next saw my great-grandmother, my wife said, “We’re praying for you,” to which the elderly woman glared at her daughter and said, “Well, I’m glad that someone still believes in prayer.” My grandmother shrugged her shoulders and did not take this personally at all, any more than one would take personally a baby crying in frustration.

Sometimes we can see the need for this sense of patience with the very elderly—those who are, for instance, slipping into dementia—far more readily than we can see that this dynamic might be required much earlier. Often, a middle-aged child will notice that he or she is starting to have to help a parent make decisions about, for instance, where to move his or her stuff. Often, the grown child will say, “We’ve reversed roles!” I have even seen situations where grown children are dealing with their parents’ tumultuous love-lives in their retirement complexes, with every conversation about who likes whom, and who is breaking up with whom. “It’s just like middle school all over again,” said one woman. “Except that the middle-schooler is my mother!” And not only is this true, but it can manifest in many different ways. Remember, after all, just how cruel and scary those years of the edge between childhood and adolescence could be. One observer noted the disequilibrium that could be felt by those who had spent their lives and careers achieving social and material status only to find in the anonymity of the eldercare facility all the cliques and rivalries of high school, “that there is a ‘cool table’ in the nursing home’s dining room, and we have not been invited to sit there.”65

As a matter of fact, the comparison is completely apt. If we live long enough, we will regress backward past the recapitulation of those awkward years into some stage of dependence and infancy. Some of this starts with the indignities—the three-star general who has fallen in his bathtub and recognizes that the medical technicians helping him up are talking to him with the unmistakable tone and cadence with which one talks to a small child. Often this degeneration can be startling to the one experiencing it, and to those who love that person. In some ways, it can threaten to almost unravel history, so we are not sure what now constitutes personal identity. The gentle, warm, family man who now, in his dementia, screams profanities at his wife, threatening to shoot her for trampling his rose garden, as she stands before him in the living room. The faithful Christian woman who led the missions efforts for her church now, in her confused mental state, reverts to her life as she knew it before she came to faith—mocking the “fairy-tales” of religion, seeming to deny even Christ himself. Such can be disorienting to family and friends to the point of desperation. And yet, such moments can also remind us that we are more than our cognition, that somewhere in the haze of confusion there is a person deeply loved by Jesus, someone the Good Shepherd is walking into the woods to find.

This is the reason many subconsciously fear the elderly, and the reason we wish to deny our own aging, quickly covering over the gray in our hair. It’s the same reason we often fear children. We despise weakness. That’s because we do not know who we are. Historian Will Durant mused that old age precedes death the way it does in order to gently strip us of that to which we cling. “And just as the child was protected by insensitivity on its entry into the world,” he wrote, “so old age is eased by an apathy of sense and will, and nature slowly administers a general anesthesia before she permits Time’s scythe to complete the most major of operations.”66

If, though, we judge the value of our own lives by our “usefulness” and our “independence,” we will despise the revelation in those who once seemed strong and independent that things are quite otherwise. That is betrayed even in the way we speak about our old age, when we do. Sometimes in the exasperation of dealing with an aging relative, one might say, “I hope I don’t live long enough to be a burden on my children!” I will admit I have said this myself, and I did repeatedly until I read an article by an ethicist I admire on why he wanted to live long enough to burden his children. Recounting the way he had stood in a hot shower with a child with croup and had run alongside the wobbling bicycle of his children, this man concluded that bearing burdens is what a family is, as opposed to a group of independent agents contracting with one another.67

I blushed as I recognized in my words what lay underneath them: pride. I see it even now, as I want to minister to others within the church, but am humiliated when I have to say the words, “I need you.” I hesitated to even accept, much less ask for, financial help from friends when, as a poor young couple, Maria and I faced costly adoption fees for our children. I was humiliated when, in the darkest time in my ministry, I had to say to a group of friends, “I fear that I might be about to collapse and fall. Can you please help me?” I hesitate to even type that, for fear that you will find out how embarrassingly recent that was. Again, I am driven to see myself by my performance when God gave to me a church to show me otherwise, a community that is, by definition, the place not only where we can bear one another’s burdens but where, by God’s providence, we are often forced to the place where we must seek to have our burdens borne by others, lest we fall beneath their weight. This too is grace. Dependence is not weakness. Weakness is not failure. Failure is not fatal.

Our care for the elderly ought to remind us what we first saw at the cross. The books of 1 and 2 Samuel are filled with the exploits of David. In his heroism (as in the slaying of Goliath), in his sin (his predatory behavior toward Bathsheba), and even in his sorrow (the death of his son Absalom), David was always a blur of activity. Saul had killed his thousands, but David his tens of thousands. Moses had written his songs here and there, but David the Psalms. And yet, the book of 1 Kings opens with a very different picture: David, “old and advanced in years,” shivering beneath the covers of a bed, unable to be warmed even by a young woman in the bed with him (1 Kings 1:1–4). The mighty warrior was humiliated in his frailty, in the collapse of his kingdom. And yet, the final act of the warrior-king of Israel was to point from his bed to another, to his son who was to follow him onto the throne; David received his mortality as a gift. When David’s servants said to him, “May your God make the name of Solomon more famous than yours, and make his throne greater than your throne” (1 Kings 1:47), David did not chafe with envy, as Saul had done a generation earlier with David. Instead, he bowed himself down on the bed, and gave thanks: “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who has granted someone to sit on my throne this day, my own eyes seeing it” (1 Kings 1:48). In this, David gazed beyond his immediate son to his descendant he could see from afar. He modeled centuries before what John the Baptist did when he said that he must decrease that the Son of David might increase (John 3:30), when he pointed away from himself to the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). This is not humiliation but glory—the glory of the cross.

Care for the elderly in your family, and in your church, not grudgingly but out of love and a sense of privilege. Where they are walking, you will walk too. Simon Peter prized his strength and independence. He was the swashbuckling would-be protector of Jesus, assuming he would save Jesus from the cross (Matt. 26:47-56). This bravado would not stand. After his resurrection from the dead, Jesus encountered Peter, now humbled by the exposure of his denial of Jesus. Commissioning Simon Peter to “feed my sheep” was grace. The one-time coward would proclaim the apostolic message. But this is not a comeback story. “Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go” (John 21:18). Peter’s life would end not in the applause of a great old man, but in the humiliation of one carried away to crucifixion. After all of this Jesus repeated to him the words he had said to him at the beginning, “Follow me” (John 21:19). We do not know how or when, but if we are following Jesus, we too will walk the way to our cross. Or, rather, we will be carried there. The life cycle, starting and ending in helplessness, ought to drive us back to where our new life started, where it will end, and where it will begin again—the cross.

* * * *

Taking a break from writing this chapter, I stopped in the hallway to watch my son Samuel walk past me. Twelve years old now, he looks more like the man he will be than the toddler I mentioned before. I can’t help but wonder what burdens await him, dealing with me at the end of my story. Will I be insisting on keeping all my books after I’m too frail to walk up the stairs to my library? Will he have to tell me I can’t have a library in my little apartment at the senior-care center? Even worse, will he have to wipe the drool from my chin, as I lie in a hospital bed somewhere? Will his last memories of me be of emptying my bedpan or changing my colostomy bag? I don’t want him to remember me like that. I want him to remember me as the father who would sit in the floor and pretend to be a dinosaur when he was little, or as the whirl of activity who was preaching and teaching and debating important issues on television. I don’t like those thoughts, because they betray my pride and selfishness. It just may be that in those moments of my gasping for air, my son will see the real me better than he ever has. He will see there the one who, like a crucified robber, can only look to the seemingly helpless man on the other side of me, and say, as I spit the welling blood from my mouth, “Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.”

Maybe he will remember as he watches the life drain out of me what I tried to teach him about the life that is to come. And, maybe, he will watch me learning about it right in front of him. It could be that I, like so many I have watched die, will spend those last moments reliving my childhood, seeing the faces of those who loved me. Perhaps I will, in the kaleidoscope of images from my utter dependence in infancy until then, see how God was at work in ways I never even saw enough to be grateful. Maybe I will recognize that God’s goodness to me—those little moments of comfort and flashes of grace—were his ways of preparing me for a kingdom that is not the end of a story, but the continuation of an old way, in a new way. Perhaps Samuel will see his father finally let go of the relentless drive to performance and approval, as I see that I was loved all along, just as I am. Maybe in that moment, my son will imagine me not as he sees me there, helplessly shrinking beneath the bed-sheets, but young again, happy again, walking into the uncreated light of the future God has prepared for me. Perhaps there, as he hears the heart monitor’s beeping turn flat, he will picture that rejuvenated father of his, turning around with a smile on my face and maybe, just maybe, a little cloth owl in my hand.