The Inside of Aging: Disappointment with Church

This is #17 in a series of essays on aging.

Young people run hot and cold, and that shows in the way they relate to church. They are rarely neutral. They either love it or hate it. At least, that’s my memory. I remember my fellow college students being fiercely loyal to a local church, loyal to the point of blindness. The pastor could do no wrong, and very bright students took his word for things without blinking.

At the other extreme were students who blamed church for half the evils of the world. They were intolerant of the church’s intolerance, and they expressed it vehemently.

It doesn’t look as though anything has changed. Blind loyalty or angry rejection: those seem to be the choices for young people.

You can find those attitudes in older people, but not as frequently. As we age we settle into ourselves, and don’t stray far out of our regular habits. Church, or non-church, is one of those. Maybe at one time, not attending church was an act of conscious rebellion. Not any more. By the time they are old, it wouldn’t occur to non-attenders to go to church on Sunday morning any more than to a strip club.

It’s not terribly different with those who attend church regularly. Are they loyal? Yes, but it’s rarely a fighting loyalty. It’s what they do. They know what to expect, and they like it.

That’s the context within which disappointment with church sets in. It usually begins with change. Music seems to be the most volatile subject: whatever is new or different, whatever displaces the familiar, will certainly upset some people, usually older people.

Any change rankles. The time of service—my goodness, it seems that some people think it was written on Moses’s stone tablets that church must start at 10:00. (Or 11:00, or 9:30. It doesn’t matter, as soon as you establish a time, it’s sacred.)

How about a new pastor? How about a new color of paint? Some people will fight and protest, but most just grumble. Or even less: they say nothing but suffer disappointment. Church just isn’t the same for them.

Old people lose control of the church. Largely, that’s because they don’t want to be in charge any longer. They don’t feel up to attending night board meetings. Tasks like organizing a luncheon or leading a Bible study demand more than they care to manage. In their younger years, they were eager to take things on. Now they want the comfort of church to continue to flow, just as it always has, without their leadership.

They miss the respect they got from leading, however; and they miss the sense of control. For aging people lots of life begins to feel beyond control.

Most carry on. They’ve weathered worse crises in life. Nonetheless, it’s a sorry reality when going to church becomes a bore or a chore. Not quite what you wanted it to be. Not quite what you remember.

Church is meant to be deeply optimistic. It’s based on idealism: that people can gather to love each other and adore God. Love, joy and peace are its aims. Community is its form. Family is its constitution. You should never feel disappointment with church. People do, however. Older people do. Yet they keep going. It’s a habit.

The Inside of Aging: Disappointment with Friends

This is #16 in a series of essays on aging.

My greatest disappointment with friends is that they get sick and die. You want them to stay close and comfortable as an old sweater, but they’re in the hospital and you’re called on to visit them, pray for them, and assist them—not enjoy them. Worse, they are too soon dead and gone.

Friends in old age remind you that it’s all slipping away. That your life is crumbling. Who wants to be reminded of that?

There are other more ordinary disappointments. You find that your old best friend has left his wife and taken up with another woman, and he wants you to think everything is wonderful. Or, a dear friend takes a turn into nutty politics, which you can’t stand to hear about. Old people have temper tantrums, get jealous, act selfishly, and all the other human foibles that ruin friendships. I don’t think these are any more common among older people than in younger ones, but they stand out more at a late stage in life. At 70 or 80 or 90 you’re not making a lot of new lifelong friends; you want the old ones to stay the same. They don’t.

And there is no fool like an old fool.

As a result, old age can be lonely. You may have children who care about you, which brings an unparalleled, beautiful warmth. Children are rarely a substitute for friends, however. They are from a different generation and thus have a different viewpoint on life. They didn’t grow up on the music and the fashion you did. You were already in your thirties or forties when they first tapped into history and politics. A lot that is important to you passed right by them.

Besides, your children have a peculiar relationship with you—wonderful but mixed up with the traumas of surviving adolescence. You didn’t survive it side by side. You survived it as a parent and a child—terribly different points of view. It’s not the same—it can’t be—as an old, good friend.

Yet just when you need them, your friends aren’t there. They move to Florida. They get dementia. They die. And they leave you lonely.

We lean on our friends more than we realize. Though we care about them, we can’t quite see how much we depend on their presence. Yes, we take them for granted.

There’s no helping this, except to work hard not to take them for granted. Friendships can grow stronger even in your eighties or nineties. Some friends will get sick and die; but the ones that carry on with you will be a more powerful source of strength. As for the ones who get sick and die, there’s fellowship in that, too–for you also are dying.

It is still possible at any age to make new friends. They may be people you have hardly paid attention to. Maybe it’s a caregiver. Maybe it’s a neighbor. Maybe it’s the mail carrier. Maybe it’s your pastor. If you are alert to your own need, you’ll be more persistent in reaching out to them. No, they won’t make up for the friends you’ve known for a lifetime. Still, they can plug up the holes of loneliness, and maybe even open new ways of seeing and thinking.

A good question to ask yourself is: have I made any new friends lately?

The Inside of Aging: Disappointment with Work

This is #15 in a series of essays on aging.

Many people live for work. Some neglect family and friends because of the responsibilities of their jobs. They travel too often or work too late. Left with no time to play with their kids or go out to a movie with their spouse, they become one-dimensional. They have no spare time for the fellowship at church or the bowling league.

Why do they put so much into their work? For lots of different reasons. Sometimes supporting their family requires two jobs. They’ve been raised to believe that it’s a strength test: real men and real women work 60 hours a week (their fathers did). Their egos get involved in who is top dog at the office. They find work emotionally less complicated than dealing with spouse and children.

Stereotypically, this is a male problem. If you broaden your thinking, however, you’ll realize that women often have the same issues. What’s different is that the work they live for is more likely to have a domestic component, with home and children. Plenty of women become obsessively involved with cooking, cleaning, decorating, child-rearing, and so on.

Overworking is not the worst problem in the world. Great institutions are built, widgets are invented, care is provided by dedicated, hard-working people who love what they do. We need the people who live for work.

Here’s the paradox, however. They love what they do, but sadly, many look back at their years of work with disappointment, once it’s over.

When I was starting out in my career, I found it blissfully astonishing that I could write for a living. Simply working with words was enough to thrill me; I would have gladly done it for free. During my years of school I had hoped that I might actually publish articles and books someday, but the idea had sounded like flying to the moon.

Then I did it—published hundreds of magazine articles and dozens of books. I found extraordinary satisfaction in getting to do what I loved. I made a living at it. I believed I was doing good work and I hoped it contributed to our world. To ask for more would be churlish.

I never thought it would end, and it didn’t, exactly, but it changed. The journal I’d published with for decades stopped calling. Book publishers turned down manuscripts I felt sure they would have eagerly embraced at one time.

I still write—you’re looking at one result—but I can’t deny that my emotions are different. I’m thankful and proud of my life as a writer, but there’s some disappointment mixed in.

I think that’s true of practically everybody, regardless of their success. I see two versions of disappointment. One is the result of a bad ending. People get forced out, fired or laid off. The company downsizes or changes direction and they’re not needed any more. If they are self-employed, their business fails or dribbles away. No matter how nicely this is handled, they land with a thump. And at this point in their life, they don’t get to shake it off and move on. They’re not going to make a new start. They will live with disappointment.

A lot of people experience that kind of disappointment, but they’re probably not going to say so. They put a good face on it, and you’d have to be a pretty good friend to be allowed to see under that face. You sense it, though. There’s a weight of sadness that looms out of the darkness whenever they talk about their work.

Another kind of disappointment is subtler. It’s so slight you might not even recognize it in yourself.

Let’s say you end your working life at the top of your game. At the retirement dinner you are applauded and given a lifetime achievement award. Really, you couldn’t ask for more. Nevertheless, when you come down from the rush, you’re sad. It’s over. You have no more achievements ahead of you. No more awards will be given. In fact, you soon realize, people don’t quite remember what you did. It’s not important to them; they don’t associate it with you at all. Your success, whether big or small, is in the rearview mirror getting smaller and smaller.

Worse, as time passes you yourself come to think less of what you did. It wasn’t as important as it seemed to you while you were doing it. It blends into the terrain.

This disappointment seems to afflict everybody, even those who were stunningly successful. Yes, I won the national championship, but not the Olympic gold medal. Yes, people loved my music, but not like they love Taylor Swift’s.

Very few things—almost none—retain much shine a generation later. Not even for you, who did them. Almost inevitably, what motivated you at the peak of your working life now seems distant and perhaps inconsequential.

Such disappointment afflicts nearly everyone as they grow older. A pep talk won’t make it go away. What is required is a new beginning in life, a different career. You need not devalue what you did before, but you have to recognize that you are on a new stage, which has its own peculiar joys and its own particular achievements.

What can you do today that is meaningful? What tests face you that you must overcome?

It could be, for some, that simply acting cheerful and not complaining is a gigantic mountain to climb. To stop feeling sorry for yourself—or at least, to act like you’ve stopped. To give your family members a break.

It could be that a neighbor, a dog-walker, a child is your special calling: to make friends and offer camaraderie.

It could be that writing your memoirs is the demanding task, so that you can pass on the meaning of your life to your grandchildren and great grandchildren yet unborn. How else will they ever know what you really believed?

It’s up to you. What is your work now?

It’s a question I don’t really care to ask, to tell the truth. The achievements of an old man don’t much appeal to me.

But it’s the question you have to ask, in the country of old age.

The Inside of Aging: Disappointment with Family

This is #14 in a series of essays on aging.

All I really need is a song in my heart, food in my belly, and love in my family

                  –Raffi

There is no greater joy than love in a family. You look into the soft eyes of your little girl or walk hand in hand with your spouse—and you know you love and are deeply loved. Even those who have never experienced family feel its pull. I volunteer with an organization that specializes in recovery. Many of the men I meet with have no relationship with their father. Nevertheless, they may ache to find him, to know him. They miss a person they don’t know because a chorus cries out from inside their very being: I want love in my family.

Yet it’s surprisingly common to feel disappointed with family as we grow older—–to endure a nagging sense of futility, or to dwell on failures that might seem petty to others. Disappointment nags, and often reveals deeper hurt.

Some disappointments spring from hard circumstance: death, mental illness, addiction, or some other misfortune that destroys close family ties. They leave a person angry or woebegone.

Other reasons for disappointment are harder to pin down. It may stem from a dispute that seems petty. Sometimes we can’t quite remember how and why our disharmony began. Nevertheless, it’s certainly there. As people age, they may place greater hopes on family. Too often, family can’t match those elevated expectations.

Family gatherings make a classic disappointment trap. Everybody’s coming for Thanksgiving, a happy event that promises to carry you back to an idealized childhood. The trouble is, you don’t live in that ideal childhood, and you’ve forgotten how miserable those Thanksgivings can be.

So Aunt Susie says something awful to Amie, who goes into the bathroom to cry and won’t come out. Susie apologizes and says it was meant as a joke, but then gets angry at Amie for making a mountain out of a molehill. It’s tense. The turkey gets overcooked. After dinner the TV goes on and adults sit in a stupor, watching a football game they aren’t interested in. In the whole long day, not a single conversation occurs that anybody finds uplifting or meaningful.

Yet quite certainly, they will all come back and do it again a year from now.

It’s very normal, but it’s disappointing. The same might be said of other holidays, of family birthdays, or Sunday family dinners.

Such disappointments multiply for those who live near family members and see each other regularly. Close proximity is wonderful, but it can bring latent disagreements into the foreground.

For example, your middle-aged children love their father, but they also find his absent-mindedness a trifle annoying. It’s become a family joke, and for children who live nearby and suffer regularly from forgotten appointments and left-behind items, the joke may stop being funny. Will they make a fuss about it? No, of course not, it’s trivial, but they feel the annoyance. And then they feel crummy because they let something petty spoil the day.

It’s those small rubs that create most of our disappointment with family. It can add up to sadness, because the love of family carries so much weight—as it should. And rarely, rarely, do we get more than a glimpse of its full satisfactions. Family is usually humdrum, as we are; flawed as we are. We long for more, so much more.

Our disappointments remind us that nothing short of heaven will satisfy us. We are not to look for ultimate satisfaction here.

And yet…. Family matters. Love in my family is what I want. We’ve always known that, but we know it far more poignantly as we get old.

The Inside of Aging: The Presence of Death

This is #13 in a series of essays on aging.

A few days ago a photo popped up on my computer. It was a snapshot taken at a family event not too long ago, with seven people smiling at the camera. What caught my attention was the fact that four of the seven are now dead.

Death has never been far from us. Even when we were children, Death kept watch next to our beds and followed us to school. If we weren’t aware of Death’s presence, our parents were. But only now in old age is its presence palpable. I go to many funerals.

I’m not talking about fear. We may feel fear of Death depending on our circumstances. If I am in an airplane tipped downward and filled with smoke, I expect something close to panic will hit me. If my doctor tells me that I have three weeks to live, my heart will race. At other times, however—that is, at 99% of all times—I ignore Death. It seems far away.

Nevertheless, whether I fear it or not, whether I even think of it, Death is near.

When I was a child, a woman was struck by a train near our house. On my bike, I crisscrossed the tracks, searching with horror and fascination for evidence—blood, or tissue. Death seemed like an awful irruption into life, like a volcano bursting out of the earth. I didn’t know that Death was always near. Now, I’ve watched Death claim so many friends. I know that everyone in my circle must go to Death, and not too long from now. Death is not so fearful as it was when I was a child. I see it like a dim and featureless figure emerging from the gloom of a smoky room. I don’t see it clearly, but I know it is always with me.

The apostle Paul refers to Death as the last enemy. He sees a close link between sin and Death, with Death the final punishment for sin. (The final outworking of sin’s destruction?) He proclaims that Jesus’ resurrection conquered Death, making a mockery of its power; and that, by dying with Jesus in baptism, we join with Jesus in conquering Death.

I do not doubt it, but I can’t see it. Like everything associated with Death, these are matters obscured to our vision. We grasp them by faith, and faith alone. They are known by revelation, not experience. As I grow older and closer to Death, I think of these things more. This is good for me, I believe, because it makes me see Life in a wider framework. I know now (what I didn’t know when I was young) that there is a shoreline. I know very little of Life beyond the shore. God knows.

The Inside of Aging: Loss of Mind

This is #13 in a series of essays on aging.

We lose our minds in two different ways. One is forgetfulness, which is annoying. The other is dementia, which is devastating. As I understand the state of medical findings, the two are not necessarily linked. However, one creates anxiety about the other. Many older people nervously monitor their forgetfulness, fearing that they are falling into a loss of everything.

We do forget. Or, more accurately, we temporarily lose our grip on certain words, usually nouns. Names. Film and book titles. Authors. Acquaintances. It is not that we don’t know the author of War and Peace. It is just that, right now, we cannot come up with … starts with T. That name seems to be dodging around inside our brain, just out of reach. We know it will come, but it does not come when we need it to come.

My wife and I have a saying: “It takes a village to remember a noun.” It starts with a T, one says. It’s short, just two syllables, the other says. We both wrack our brains and usually, two minds being better than one, we get it. Whereas, working alone, I may never remember the name of that flowering bush in our back yard.

Permanent forgetting also occurs. I cannot remember the name of my first elementary school. Maybe with the help of the internet I could come up with it, but it’s irretrievably gone from my memory. This kind of forgetting happens throughout life, and I’m not sure it increases with aging. Whereas, losing the ability to retrieve movie titles certainly increases with the years, if my experience is any judge.

Dementia is different. Forgetting is not remembering where you put your keys. Dementia is forgetting what a key is for. That’s an oversimplification, because dementia involves all kinds of forgetting. The point stands, nevertheless, that dementia is a global loss. It may start small but eventually it can take away everything—your recognition of the people who love you, your ability to find your way home, to converse, to follow a plot, to read—everything. That shatters your life, and the lives of those you love.

You can’t fight it. Doing crossword puzzles won’t stave off dementia. Some newly developed drugs slow down the deterioration, but so far they don’t change the outcome. It’s a dreadful disease, and many people fear it. For many people, aging is shadowed by this fear.

Like cancer, it functions beyond our control. That is part of the new world. We may not lose control of our lives, but we dread doing so.

The Inside of Aging: Loss of Friends

This is #12 in a series of essays on aging.

My church has many older people, and consequently I’ve become close to many people older than I. Many are gone now; I attended their memorial services. In my own age group, death is still unusual, but I know from experience what is coming. I’m going to lose a lot of people in my age group. (Or they’ll lose me.)

As a younger person, I would have been filled with grief and disbelief over this. It is always deeply painful when someone dies before their time—a teenager, a recent graduate, someone newly married. When an older person dies, we are sad, we miss them. But we are not shocked. It does not come as an obscenity.

Older people aren’t asking, “Why did God allow this to happen?” as they might if a child were to die. They know this is part of life; old people don’t live forever. But they feel the loss. They feel the loneliness. They experience the empty space where that person has been. The atmosphere feels slightly chillier. Also, they are reminded of what they are coming to.

When we were younger, we found it impossible to believe that we would someday be no more. We simply could not imagine it, which helps to explain why young people drive too fast and jump off cliffs into lakes without knowing where the rocks are. The denial of death is a primary force.

In our older years, however, we gradually come to know that we are going to die. Sometimes, as our bodies break down and our friends disappear, death sounds almost sweet. Our friends beckon us from beyond. Fear diminishes. Fatigue makes us long for rest.

In the meantime, we feel lonely. We lose a lot of friends.

The Inside of Aging: Loss of Sex

This is #11 in a series of essays on aging.

I don’t like writing personally about sex. It should be a private matter, I think. Therefore, I’m not going to say too much about aging and the loss of sex. I will say this: it happens.

Of course, it varies tremendously. In his nineties, New Yorker editor Roger Angell wrote in fury about busybodies trying to keep elders from sex. He meant himself. I can’t imagine that anybody cared about his sex life all that much—other than he.

Generally, interest in sex declines with age. (Maybe not, with Angell.)  It doesn’t disappear, it just gradually diminishes. It’s chemical: our production of hormones decreases. This is where it gets strange. Because while the body certainly changes, the mind changes less.

Some years ago I was talking to a friend, and I mentioned how odd it was that this powerful preoccupation, a focal point of thoughts for my whole life, was gone. “Gone,” my friend said, “but not forgotten.”

He put it well. A lifetime of sexuality trains your mind. You tune in to certain signals. Your eyes follow certain people. Sex can be a compulsive attraction. If my experience is any guide, those signals still operate as you age, but there is no corresponding response. No compulsion. It’s like flicking on a light switch when the electricity is off. Nothing happens. And that surprises me, time after time.

There’s nothing tragic in this. Good sex is a great gift, but if the drive is gone, you aren’t missing anything. If you lost interest in eating oysters, it would be the same—the oysters are still there, but if you don’t care, so what? In the last few years I’ve lost most of my sense of smell. Do I regret it? Not really. I miss smelling the roses, certainly, but I don’t miss some awful and disgusting smells.

Those are not true comparisons. Sex is a consuming drive, so close to our core. Unlike oysters, unlike the sense of smell, it is a huge and omnipresent force in your life. It binds you to your spouse. It enlivens you. When it’s gone, you miss it. It leaves a noticeable gap, like a huge tree that has fallen. You’re living in a different world now.

The Inside of Aging: Lost Drive

This is #10 in a series of essays about aging.

This is utterly mysterious to me. It came out of nowhere. Nobody warned me. It affects everything.

I’ve lost my drive.

Not all my drive. Maybe 20%. Or maybe 50%. It’s hard to say exactly because it’s invisible. I’m the same person I was before, and I still care about the same menu of concerns. It’s just: I don’t care as much.

The change is most noticeable in my work. I’ve always loved to write. After I got out of college I worked for a small magazine. There, I would compete to write more of the content than anybody else. My energy for writing was boundless. Overworked? That was a meaningless concept to me.

I wanted to be the best. I wanted to build a reputation for excellence. Riches didn’t drive me, but I sought the admiration of my peers. Writing was the engine that drove my life.

Then came the Internet. At first it was purely a benefit to my work, enabling quicker and better research, opening up blogs and other free publishing opportunities, and making my work more accessible to readers. What I didn’t see—and nobody did, I think—was that the Internet would undermine magazine revenue streams. A lot of magazines went out of business, and those that survived didn’t have the money to pay journalists for travel or deep research. Book publishing also changed so that bookstores closed and non-bestsellers sold fewer copies. Publishers became more selective, and the selection criteria circled around self-promotion. In essence, publishers wanted to know whether you had a million Facebook followers before they would look at your manuscript.

I was slow to realize that I needed to adapt. I needed to seriously invest in a social media presence, building up followers. New channels for my writing needed to be found and explored. I should hustle and charm and pitch myself to a whole new set of people who had never heard of me.

But something else had changed. I’d lost my drive. I saw what I needed to do, but I didn’t want to. Self-promotion was distasteful to me. My life didn’t depend on it. I would have liked to be on top of those worlds, but I didn’t have to be. What I’d already accomplished was okay. I could still write, I could still publish; I didn’t need to have a huge audience.

And actually, it is okay. I like what I do. I really don’t want to hustle and self-promote. But if I were still 25, I would feel different. I would have to feel different.

I see my loss of drive in other areas. My garden, which I enjoy immensely, gets neglected. A list of tasks needs doing, and I’ll get to them eventually—but I’m not too worried about them.  Home repairs, same thing.

Life goes on at a more relaxed pace, meandering through the days without much in the way of deadlines. Is this the best way to live? I’m not proclaiming it as such. People who are determined to get things done do, and I appreciate their productivity. Just as surely, though, I know I’m no longer one of them. I’m living in a different world.

Some people never had much drive to begin with, so it’s hard to say that aging has changed them. Some had so much drive that it’s hard to say that they have lost any. However, many of my friends seem to relate to my lost drive. They are ready to retire. They could continue functioning at a high level if they had to, but they don’t want to. At one time they were driven to fix whatever went wrong in their house; now they would rather call a plumber. Researching which insurance company will save them money would take too much out of them, so they stay with what they know. They don’t mind paying a little more for the sake of convenience.

Losing your drive is not all bad. Life may be easier for all concerned. Whatever you say about it, though, it’s a different world.

The Inside of Aging: Loss of status

This is #9 in a series of essays on aging.

If you visit a nursing home, you’re likely to come away depressed. It’s not primarily the smell of urine and ammonia, or the tile-floor facilities. It’s the residents, ground down into a gray pablum. They may sit frozen in front of a blaring television or lie pathetically in bed. Perhaps they are propped in a wheelchair in the hallway. Speak to them, and you may get no response. Or if you do, conversation can be as nonsensical as Alice in Wonderland. The residents appear to be almost interchangeable, having lost personality. Staff may carefully address them by name, but they could be anybody. Or nobody.

The picture changes if you know a little about their pasts. You may be meeting a symphony conductor, the mother of five children, an architect, a renowned high school English teacher. With a little probing you may engage in very interesting conversation about their lifetime of work, their family, their travel, their experiences. But probably not. Dementia and other illness may have taken away their ability to carry on a conversation.

All residents in a nursing home once had some kind of interesting life. If they can’t communicate it, however, they fade into gray for other people. That ability to talk—to be witty, to show curiosity, to carry the back and forth of conversation—may be the most important component of holding on to status. If you can talk, you still have a chance to be somebody to the world. If you can’t, your accomplishments will be forgotten very quickly. You will be forgotten very quickly.

A nursing home is the ultimate in lost status. Most of those who end up there are effectively disappeared. Even their family visitors have a hard time remembering their former dignity. That’s one reason many residents get few if any visitors. Family members wonder, “What’s the point?”

Most people don’t end up in a nursing home. It’s the endpoint for only a small percentage. All the same, it’s the extreme of lost status that all of us experience as we age.

**

Your loss of status begins with appearance: graying hair, balding head, wrinkled skin, stooped walk. Facelifts, cosmetics, hair color and workouts may delay these, but not forever. If you are old, you begin to look old.

People automatically dismiss people who look old. If seated with them at a wedding, they make a little polite small talk and then turn elsewhere for conversation. The judgment based on appearance is particularly harsh with women. Almost as soon as they get gray hair they stop counting as interesting. Younger people think it’s only natural: they (we) have a deeply engrained belief that old people are of little value. I know. I was young once too.

Retirement brings another layer of lost status. The question, “What kind of work do you do?” becomes hard to answer. Dedicated hobbies and volunteering will not bring you much respect. We identify work with worth.

Here, too, women suffer the soonest and the most. “Do you work outside the home?” can be almost equivalent to asking whether you have a meaningful existence. Men join this indignity as soon as they get their last paycheck. Don’t even bother saying, “I worked in software.” As soon as you speak of your work in the past tense, you have thrown away your claim to significance.

It can happen even before you retire. As a writer, I used to encounter people who recognized my name. I might meet them at a party, or in church, and they would ask, “Are you the writer?” Often they couldn’t remember what I’d written, but they knew that I had published, an accomplishment they respected. That rarely happens now. I’m still writing, but my work is much less visible. I can feel status draining away.

Yes, we know that our worth does not depend on our appearance or on our career. It does not ultimately depend on whether we can talk. We are creatures created in God’s image. Our true worth is built on his love. Nothing takes that from us. But remember the nursing home. That loss of status and dignity may be superficial, but it is real, and it affects us all. And so do the lesser indignities that come with an aging body. We used to be somebody. Now we are trending toward nobody.

It’s a new world. The question we all face is: can we live graciously and happily in it?

For Christians, it’s also a faith question. We adore a Lord who “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing.” As we lose status we are faced with the reality of following in his footsteps.