Wrinkles

During my stay here in Brisbane, I have been able to spend some time with a few elderly people. I don't want to define "elderly," because I have found that I lose friends that way.

Something that my friend Wilson McCoy shared with me while he was here stuck with me and has not gone away. Wilson said, "A lack of respect for age is unique to the West." Every other culture honors age as something to be gained. But where I come from, we run from age. We cut, pull, stitch, deprave, and torture our bodies simply so that we may look young. Because wrinkles are bad.

But we don't just run away from looking old, do we? We don't want to have anything to do with old. I feel a punch in my stomach every time I mention Ninja Turtles to a child and that child has no idea what I'm talking about. I feel out of the loop. I feel irrelevant. I feel--old.

And so when it comes to hanging out with old people, many of us cringe. We fear that we won't know what to say, or that we will have to repeat everything louder so that they will understand, or that they will try to show us their wounds from the war. But we mostly fear that we won't get anything from the experience. That we will be bored.

One theme that is found throughout the biblical texts is "taking care of the widow and the orphan"--two symbols of those who cannot care for themselves. Or, maybe better phrased, those who are normally forgotten by the masses. So, friends, I exhort each of us to not only talk to old people, love old people, and visit old people. I exhort each of us to respect old people, because they made mistakes that we, now, don't have to. Because they took care of us when we were not able to take care of ourselves. Because there are a lot of great things that come with wrinkles.