I’m reading a book about the ageless soul, written by someone well past my years, who talks about aging vs being old.

It is the perfect time of life to think about aging. I see the signs in the mirror and feel it when I walk up the steps, when I kneel down and then try to get up.

This body of mine bears the marks of the life I’ve lived. I can hardly wrap my mind around the nearness of the next decade. Only five months away from what seemed ancient when I was a teenager. And now it is on my doorstep.

The decade markers are weighty, and my candle burns.

“Seventy years are given to us! Some even live to eighty.
Psalm 90

Seventy years. Maybe eighty. My dad lived past ninety. Will I? I’ve been here a pretty long time already. What is before me? How much time is left on this earth?

Aging happens to all of us, even my four-month-old littlest neighbor is growing, changing, becoming something different. He is aging.

Old is not the same as aging.

Aging brings experience, knowledge, wisdom. It is life-giving. My true self emerges and continues to grow strong even while my body, which is the tent, lacks its former vigor.

” . . . we emerge in our older years with the beauty and wings of a butterfly.”
— Thomas Moore

I love butterflies, the way they float with the gentlest breeze, stop to nibble a flower and sip the lifegiving nectar. They move unhurried, enjoying the brief life they are allotted.

In the quiet of the early morning I looked backward, into the years gone before. I muse on the hard places, events that changed life as I knew it. I observed how God used the tests and trials, the joys and victories to teach and mold and conform me. I have aged. My soul has been nurtured. I have participated and found purpose in my life.

I considered my years, the number of them left on this earth in a body that is temporary. I will not be afraid of my tomorrows, however they come. There is a loving hand, a true heart, a purposeful Father who guides my years, my days, who gives my every breath. He was always there. He is here now. He will be where I am going.

So I will watch the days of the calendar tick off one by one. I will live in the newness of life in Christ Jesus my Lord. I will love life and sip the nectar it offers.

And I will go and be like the butterfly.

Monday grace.