The Inside of Aging: What It All Means

This is #23 in a series of essays on aging.

Aging involves inevitable disappointment and loss, and often includes suffering and grief. We naturally ask why. Has God deserted me? Why can’t I live in peace?

The increase in suicide may be a response to these questions. It is above all else an assertion of individual autonomy: “I will decide the timing of my death. This is my business, and nobody else’s.” Underneath that assertion is a question: Why am I still alive, when I have nothing important to do and nobody really depends on me? Why am I still alive, while I suffer? If I feel I have done everything on earth I care to do, and if life is filled with loss and disappointment, why not choose to end the game?

Those are hard questions to answer, and it is not my interest to disparage them. Indeed, I think they are unanswerable outside of a God-centered perspective. People who take the Bible seriously, however, have a framework for responding. There may be no precision to the answers, because we cannot see into the other side of death. God will meet us there, and we will see him “face to face.” Our lives in that other realm remain shadowy. What will we do? Will we see a connection between what we do here and now and what we do then?

It does seem clear that there is a connection. The promise of heaven is not like reincarnation. It is we who will rejoice there, not some other creatures. And what we will do and think will not be the actions of somebody alien to us. It will be us as we have become.

It stands to reason, then, that whatever we experience in the last days of our life is in some way a preparation. Given the amount of disappointment and loss involved, we can speculate that we are meant to experience purification—that our earthly hopes and our earthly ambitions are being squeezed out of us so that we can more easily absorb, without distraction, the most sustained and euphoric infilling of our lives.

We live today by faith, hope and love. Faith is famously “confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” (Hebrews 11:1) Our faith is in God, whom we do not see, and the future he has for us, which is equally unseen. We are told that what God has planned will be good beyond our dreams. We believe we are being readied for it. That may not make loss and disappointment easier to take, but it ought to fortify us. We put our faith and trust in God; he knows why we are here.

Tags: Meaning