At sixteen, my very first job was as a nurse's aid in a nursing home. It was a real and raw introduction to aging in all its deterioraton, loss and sorrow. At the time, my grandparents were in their early sixties and that was my vast experience with "old people". I had no idea that aging had such a sad, sometimes pathetic alter ego. I remember lining up all the oldsters who were not capable of feeding themselves during mealtime and serving three or four of them spoonful by spoonful.
Sometimes I would stare into the vacant eyes of a woman who suffered dementia and wonder what her life had been like when she was young. Then, as I cut small pieces of toast and spooned another bite of pureed peaches into another shriveled mouth, I would create a screen play in my mind about their experiences. I imagined amazing hopes, dreams, passions and loves - before their lives were reduced to a "feeding line".
It became my regular practice to say to myself: "Old Mrs. Jones was my age once. She had a youthful body and strong mind. She had dreams. She had a life!" I came to realize that most people still have a "younger soul" existing within them that longs for the same things younger people long after: Peace. Hope. Love.
I only wish that I had known a powerful truth earlier - a truth that would give peace and hope to the old and hopeless. That truth: If we know Jesus as our personal savior, it doesn't matter how much our mind or body decays. Our eternity - the bulk of our existence is wrapped in an amazing promise of a new and glorified body one day:
2 Corinthians 5: 1 For we know that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2 For indeed in this house we groan, longing to be clothed with our dwelling from heaven, 3 inasmuch as we, having put it on, will not be found naked. 4 For indeed while we are in this tent, we groan, being burdened, because we do not want to be unclothed but to be clothed, so that what is mortal will be swallowed up by life. 5 Now He who prepared us for this very purpose is God, who gave to us the Spirit as a pledge.
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