Worship what is true. Give God the holy worship He commands, being ready to join in the fellowship of Christ’s suffering. Repent daily. Be a covenant member of a faithful church. Sing psalms. Feast in the presence of your enemies. If you are in Christ, your enemies are Christ’s enemies. And this means we have nothing to fear.

The table was set with unfussy Corelle dishes, yellow paisley cloth napkins, and water glasses. One of the pastor’s sons, a colleague of mine from the university, pulled a gallon plastic jug of water out of the refrigerator and started filling the water glasses. “It’s not filtered water. I just like it cold,” Pastor Ken Smith laughed as he greeted me with a warm handshake and pulled me gently but firmly over the threshold. This was one of my first experiences of a Christian family feast, one that included the Smith family, other brothers and sisters from the church, and me. The room hummed with grown-up laughter and the sing-song of children’s voices. It had been so very long since I had experienced the sound of men’s voices laughing and the delight of a child’s giggle. While I proclaimed the value of diversity, my community was entirely composed of white thirty-something lesbian Ph.D.s in the humanities. Children dragged in extra chairs. Bowls were overflowing with Floy Smith’s steaming and savory sweet-and-sour soybeans, and Ken herded us to the table with a gentle but firm touch. When we all sat down and pulled up our mix-and-match chairs to the long family table, no elbow room remained. It was intimate but not stuffy. The conversation was marked with edgy questions of the day (on which I took an opposing side) and Bible verses and principles, some that stood as answers and others that opened more questions. It seemed to me that Pastor Ken Smith and these other Christians used the Bible both for reference and for lingering long. We ate and talked and laughed. And then we sang Psalm 23.

Voices in all four parts to the tune of Crimond rang strong and right as rain. And when we sang, “A table Thou has furnished me, in presence of my foes,” I started to lose my sense of which way was up. I started to get all turned around, as if I had absentmindedly taken the wrong path on a well-walked trail. I was trained to play the part of the victim and to perceive myself as a “sexual minority,” voiceless among the voiced. As we sang, I said to myself, “Yes, dear victim, here you are in the presence of your foes, these awful hateful people who want to trample on your rights.” But even though victimhood served as my catechism, I couldn’t make myself believe this while singing Psalm 23. Something wasn’t right. And that’s when it dawned on me that I, the English professor, was misreading the text. I wasn’t the one dining in the presence of my enemies. I was the enemy.
Dinner concluded with prayer. Prayer was reverent and steady. There were natural pauses and unhurried reflections as these Christians shared their hearts with each other and with God. The unyielding and unanswered questions that had marked the earlier part of this evening were now put into the hand of God. They were neither swept under the rug nor turned into objects of obsession and grief. At the final “amen,” someone said, “Let’s sing Psalm 122.” Most of the people had this one memorized too, but Floy gently touched my arm and placed an open Psalter in my hands. And so with gusto and confidence, voices raised in song once again: “I was glad to hear them saying ‘to the Lord’s house let us go.’ For our feet will soon be standing in your gates Jerusalem.

Because of God’s mercies that are new every morning, and because we are His children, we are growing in our inner selves younger – growing to look more and more like the true children of God even while our outer selves are growing older. Such is the grand and glorious paradox of Christian aging. What does that mean for us? It means that as Christians, we do not have to chase the ever-elusive promise of youth. We do not have to fix our eyes on the vanity of the physical. It means that we can still steward our bodies, but we can not have our entire self-worth and value rest on them. 

I recently went to a yearly checkup, and the doc (who looked to be about 16, in my estimation) was explaining to me the results of my blood work, blood pressure, weight, and the rest of it, led her explanation with these words: “When you reach a certain age…”
I knew what she was saying. Blood work aside, I’ve got an ache in my left leg, and I don’t know exactly how it got there. But it’s there, and even when I’m typing these words, it’s kind of throbbing down my side. Stuff like this happens to me from time to time; it’s not a big deal, but it does happen, and it reminds me that I am indeed aging. We all are. The law of entropy which tells us that natural processes only run in one direction – that is in a degrading direction – is applicable to our physical bodies. We are deteriorating creatures.
And yet for the Christian, there is a glorious paradox that comes in aging – one that causes a great measure of joy when you could feel an increasingly measure of sorrow that you cannot do the things that you were once able to do. Here is how Paul would frame this paradox:
Therefore we do not give up. Even though our outer person is being destroyed, our inner person is being renewed day by day. For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory. So we do not focus on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal (2 Cor. 4:16-18).
There’s no pulling punches here, but rather an embracing of two simultaneous realities for the Christian.
The first reality is that of aging. That our outer person, our physical bodies, are on the downhill.
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 I hope that you reach the end of your life and can say with Joshua, “I am about to go the way of all the earth, and you know in your hearts and souls, all of you, that not one word has failed of all the good things that the LORD your God promised concerning you. All have come to pass for you; not one of them has failed” (Josh 23:14).

Now Joshua was old and advanced in years, and the LORD said to him, “You are old and advanced in years, and there remains yet very much land to possess… Now therefore divide this land for an inheritance to the nine tribes and half the tribe of Manasseh”
Joshua 13:1, 7
Can you imagine promises so certain? The Israelites had wandered in the wilderness for 40 years because of their unbelief. God had promised them a land, and they refused to believe Him. Fast-forward and Joshua has brought them in and they have begun the conquest of Canaan. They had defeated king after king, but there was still work to be done. Joshua is too old to continue with the Israelites, so what is he to do? “…divide this land for an inheritance…”
Can you imagine promises so certain? Divide up the land. What land? The land you haven’t conquered yet, but the land that was promised.
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