“They will still bear fruit in old age; they will be full of sap and very green…” (Psalm 92:14)
Can I tell you something odd?
Today, as I was surfing through the program containing all the articles in this website from over a dozen years of blogging, I came across an unfinished draft of one called “the last temptations of the aged.” I breezed right past it, in search of something else I was looking for.
A moment later, I was back. That was an intriguing title, I thought. Must have started that article a year or more back. Wonder what it says.
After reading it, I deleted the entire thing.
It was indeed written about two years back, and then left in the program and forgotten. But the strange part is that nothing about it is true in my life now.
Not a thing.
I had listed as temptations of the elderly things like not exercising as much, not eating as healthily as previously, reading more for indulgement rather than edification, wanting to sleep more and such.
“Where was my head?” I wondered. “I’m 75 years old and I’m not reading shallow novels, I’m exercising and I’m trying my dead-level best to stay healthy. I am not lying around resting all the time. I’m constantly at work serving the Lord. In some ways, these are the most productive years of my life.”
Wonder what was going on to inspire such a depressing list.
So, what, I now ask myself, are the true “final” temptations of the elderly? I can come up with an answer to that—but no one should interpret this as any kind of confession.
I’m doing just fine, and that’s a fact. But I know a lot of seniors and, therefore, my list of temptations that the older people deal with includes these…
1) The elderly often grow sentimental about the past and negative about the present.
The cartoon showed an old gent on his front porch telling someone, “Yep, in my 88 years, I’ve seen a lot of changes. And I been agin every one of them!”
That’s a caricature. Not all seniors are that way, thank the Lord. There are some pretty wonderful older people. I seize the promise of Psalm 92:14 and claim it. “They will still bear fruit in old age; they will be full of sap (youthful!) and very green.”
2) The elderly often remember wrong—recalling hurts and slights that were passing things from a friend or loved one and now exaggerating them in memory. They should have forgotten and forgiven and never looked back.
My dad was this way. In his 90s, he kept talking about something his mother did to him when he was 18. We would try to reason him out of it, but nothing worked. Only time took care of this.
