BitterSweetLife

I’ve been thinking recently about aging. Undeniably it’s bittersweet, and even I can testify to that. You get older and you get wiser—but you also get more brittle and you lose hair. With age comes experience, but experience has a bitter edge. And while one may gain a greater love for beauty, one may also come to possess less of it. All things considered, most would agree: It seems better to be young.

Aging and death are mysterious entities, and we fight them at the deepest levels. They seem alien and out of place. We find ourselves asking why they exist at all.

But if we make this query, there’s another we must make as well. Why does eternal life exist? (If we scoff at the reality, we must at least admit the concept—people have been talking as if it’s real forever.) The two live side by side: this aging, “living death,” in Augustine’s words, and this incorrigible perfection, eternal life. Why does eternal life exist? Although the answer defies us, this is one of those cases where the truth, as near as we may come to it, is a prior question.

Question: Why does eternal life exist?
Answer: Why does aging exist?

The problem, aging, precedes the miracle, eternal life; and if we knew what preceded the problem, we would comprehend the whole relationship perfectly. Instead, we can only hazard guesses.

Heaven is ageless, but I suspect agelessness there will be young—because death is an anomaly, and we all know this fact instinctively. In heaven, we’ll find the wisdom “of age” seated in the energy and beauty “of youth.” And what is more, we’ll look “like ourselves.” Puzzling.

In the end, we can age gracefully because of a graceful God who’s taken the sting out of death. In Christ, we know that each new wrinkle, each inch coming off the vertical,* will be one more cause for joy later on. When aging is permanently revoked, and instantaneous renewal sets in, we’ll laugh death in the face. If we’re wise, we’ll start laughing now.

In this sense, aging can be defined: In Christ, a little more death today is a little more life forever. There’s nothing age can do that heaven won’t renew with advantages.

Not so if we idolize transient beauty. In a wry reversal, Hollywood’s beauticians are really her morticians. If our hopes are for this life only, aging deserves all the horror we can muster.


* As in a basketball game. But you should really know that.