Category Archives: Aging

Character Counts

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Last Friday the 91 year old mother of a friend died quietly after living a much-admired life, and her funeral tomorrow is sure to be a long one. That’s how it goes after a life has been well lived.

Elizabeth SchambachElizabeth Schambach worked hard this side of eternity, beginning by growing up amidst 13 siblings. After marrying at 19, she and her husband bought a farm in America’s heartland and raised 6 children of their own. Working for her family and on the farm through her 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s wasn’t easy, but she labored faithfully at the tasks given her, even after losing her husband at 58.

John’s early death hadn’t been part of the plan, and she was a widow  nearly as many years as she’d been a wife (39 married, 33 a widow). But God never stopped blessing this lady and made sure she wasn’t lonely. He enriched her life with 6 children-in-law, 23 grandchildren, 51 great-grandchildren, and 1 great-great-grandchild!

Hands.And that wasn’t all. God had a gentle plan for Elizabeth’s exit from this world last week. She’d eaten dinner at the care facility where she lived and then had attended a festive hymn sing. Being a lover of music, she’d clapped her hands to the beat of the old songs she loved so much, and went off to bed that night with music in her heart.

But 90 minutes after Elizabeth had drifted to sleep, she was woken by the surprise of her life when she arrived into the presence of Jesus Christ himself! My guess is she picked up right where she’d left off at the hymn sing, clapping her hands and singing with joy!

Although Elizabeth Schambach had enough family members to fill a town hall, she’d never been a famous woman. She hadn’t run for political office, had never been on the cover of a magazine, didn’t compete in the Olympics, and wasn’t able to amass a fortune. But she did something far superior to any of that. She won God’s approval.

And she did it by living the life he intended her to live, in the not-so-easy circumstances in which he placed her, a life of impeccable character and satisfied contentment.

Interestingly, that’s what he’s looking for in all of us, because character counts big-time with God.

God's instruction bookLike Elizabeth, a person of honorable character won’t be swayed by popular opinion and won’t put stock in the latest fads. She won’t long for fortune or fame. Instead she’ll base her behavior on God’s instruction manual without trying to edit out the distasteful parts. And when the right decisions always end up being the hardest ones, she’ll make them anyway.

If Elizabeth was here, she could probably attest to all of that. But she might also want to add a line from an old hymn: “It will be worth it all, when I see Jesus.”

And now….  it is.

“A wife of noble character …. is worth far more than rubies. A woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.” (Proverbs 31:10)

C’mon and dance with me!

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Nate and I didn’t know how to dance. The first reason was that he struggled to find any sense of rhythm or beat. When he was in the Army, I remember attending a parade demonstration at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Hundreds of uniformed soldiers passed in front of us, marching in perfect step to the leader’s cadence…. except one. Despite all those soldiers wearing identical clothes, I found Nate immediately.

The second reason we were dance-ignorant was that I was raised to believe dancing was wrong. I had to sign a statement when I became a 16 year old member of my church, promising not to dance (among other things). Later when I chose a conservative Christian college, I signed a similar pledge.

Throughout my childhood, I wasn’t allowed to attend dance classes or school dances, nor could I listen to dance music. It mystified me, since Mom was adventuresome and loved music herself.

Then one day, while I was jumping around to “oldies” music at home, the real truth came out. Mom was watching me cavort to the beat and said, “It’s too bad we don’t believe in dancing. You’d be good at it.”

I realized then that all the no-dancing rules were just that: written rules she was trying to obey on the outside while on the inside she’d been dancing all those years. Though the policy didn’t change, figuring that out made me feel a lot better.

The bottom line was that neither Nate nor I ever learned to dance, not even after we decided it wasn’t really wrong. But we did learn to fake it enough to shuffle around a wedding reception dance floor, at least on the slower tunes.

All of us can get caught up in the letter of a law and then miss the spirit of it. That’s  a serious offense, as Jesus pointed out to the biblical Pharisees. Their 600 rigid religious laws had strayed far from what God had intended when he gave the 10 commandments. So Jesus straightened it out with 2 new commands that swept away all the pharisaical add-ons. “Love God, and love others.”

Those aren’t always easy to do, but they’re easy to understand. And if we put all our actions through that grid, the result will be lives lived in the gracious spirit of the law.

These days I still don’t know how to dance, but a year ago, my cousin Calvin and I decided to try our luck at jitterbugging. Jumping around a wedding reception dance floor in no particular pattern might not have been real dancing, but for the two of us non-dancers, it turned out to be an awful lot of fun.

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:37-40)

Gettin’ Old

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Recently I bumped into some friends Nate and I had known in our early days of marriage. They were older than us by about a decade, and we always admired them greatly.

Handshake

I could tell the husband didn’t recognize me, so I said, “It’s Margaret Nyman,” as I shook his hand and smiled.

But nothing.

“From Moody Church?” I added. But he needed more.

“You sent an encouraging letter to me after Nate died.”

And finally it clicked.

“Oh yes! Margaret!” he said, folding me into a hug.

But what he said next was a bit unsettling, though spoken without the slightest tinge of malice. Studying my face he said, “Oh my! It has been a long time since I’ve seen you!”

Not sure how to respond, I just chuckled and turned to greet his wife.

Sometimes the truth arrives as a smack, and I thought about this man’s comment for quite a while. But he was only saying out loud what I’d seen in my mirror every day.

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Doris D.My sister Mary and I have always been fans of Doris Day, an actress who played the wholesome girl-next-door in movies of the ‘50’s and 60’s. We loved her sugar-sweet romantic comedies and were captivated recently when a special-edition magazine about her life hit newsstands.

When we paged to current-day pictures of this once-adorable woman, however, we gasped, responding much like my friend did to me: “Oh my! What happened to her?”

Mary recovered first, and in a quiet voice said, “It comes to all of us.” And that’s the truth of our steadily declining physical selves.

Doris1.jpg

A popular belief these days is that the Baby Boomer generation, approximately 76-million strong, won’t age. Although this group “got wild” in their teens and twenties, eventually they brought national attention to health food and were responsible for starting the running craze.

They shun retirement and retirement homes, and news commentators have noted Boomers are in a state of denial about their own aging and death, preferring instead to “think about it later.” But deep down, they know it’ll come.

It’s not that each of us didn’t have a grand beginning. What could be more remarkable than God “knitting us together in our mothers’ wombs”? (Psalm 139) If we stockpile enough years, though, Mary’s statement becomes everybody’s bottom line: “It comes to all of us.”

But there is an up-side. Spurgeon says it well: “Our bodies humble us, and that is about the best thing they do for us.” Since God values humility, maybe that’s the whole reason he designed the aging process as he did.

So, no matter how many old friends don’t recognize us through our wrinkles, we mustn’t despair. For now, it’s a healthy humbling, and some day? It’s all going to come to a delightful conclusion:

“The Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will [when he returns] transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.” (Philippians 3:20-21)