Ageless
As a Southern-California teenager, I’d haul my long green surfboard, dubbed The Pickle, to Newport Beach every weekend. I wasn’t much of a surfer, but I did loved the wind and the waves, and I still do.
It’d been a long time since I’d done that, so a few years back near the Mexican Coast, I asked one of my friends where I might take a some brush-up lessons.
A shocked expression washed over her face. “At your age?”
I shrugged. “Sorry. I didn’t know there was an ‘age’ for it.”
Fact is, I’ve never very age-conscious at any time in my life. Because age is a relative measurement, right? And if we Christians are going to live forever, then we’re really all still pretty young.
So why do we pigeon-hole ourselves into these groups? Is it because our moms used to say, “Act your age?” I don’t think that’s what she meant…
Norman Vincent Peal said, “Forget your age and live your life.” That’s what Moses did. He was 120 years old when he died, yet his eyesight was clear and he was as strong as ever – Deut. 34:7. And Caleb was 85 when he and his army drove the Canaanites out of Hebron. He told Joshua, “I am still as strong today as I was in the day Moses sent me” (at age 40). “As my strength was then, so my strength is now, for war and for going out and coming in” (Josh 14:11).
I know our bodies change, but could it be that some of those changes have to do with our own inactivity, i.e. “acting our ages”? Could be. But perhaps aging has more to do with attitude than anything else. I remember Lester Sumrall once saying, “I’ve seen fifteen-year-olds who are old, and eighty-year-olds who are young,” (He was one of them), “because being young is about having a future. It’s about having hopes and dreams.”
What I’m trying to do here is liberate you from the compulsion to live the way everyone does. Don’t feel compelled to squeeze yourself into your culture’s predetermined mold. Rise above it and be yourself – the self the Bible promises you can be. Because you’re not really young, you’re not middle-aged, and you’re not old. You are…ageless.
David