Kruger pointed out the three of them are in “a little bit more of a stable season” versus being in their 20s when “everything was changing constantly.”
“There’s so many question marks” during that time of life, she said. That doesn’t mean being older is “easier. [It] doesn’t mean there aren’t hard things, but there’s kind of a settledness.”
The women agreed that, while aging is difficult, they have no desire to go back to their younger ages and stages of life. Doctor said that “there is a joy” in looking back and seeing how God has worked and brought her through challenging life experiences. “You come to that place of not just acceptance of the things,” she said, “but [the] value of things, where you see how the Lord has used it.”
Doctor went on to share a story about one time when she was in her early 40s and she went to a younger friend’s house. Later, the friend thanked her for coming over, saying, “I’ve been wanting to meet with an older woman.”
“I thought, ‘Is she wanting me to introduce her to one?’” said Doctor. Then Doctor realized, “I think she meant me.”
The other two shared examples of when they started to realize they were aging.
“For me, it’s more the absence of some things,” said Kruger. “It used to be when I would go speak at places, they would be like, ‘Oh, you’re the speaker? Do you have children?,’” conveying, “You’re really young.”
“And I don’t hear those questions anymore,” Kruger said. No one cards her anymore when she buys alcohol, and people “say ‘ma’am’ a lot.”
“I started talking a lot about church mothers and how we needed church mothers in the church,” Wilkin shared, “because I’m like, ‘Doesn’t everybody want that?’ Thinking, ‘I want that.’ And then people at my church started calling me ‘Mama Jen.’ And I was like, ‘Oh…oh.’”
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Another shift happened when at age 38 Wilkin moved from a church with an older demographic to a church with a younger one. She went from being “too young to have any credibility to so old that I was supposed to be a source and fountainhead of wisdom, just because of the context of where we were doing ministry.”
Aging in modern American culture is difficult for a variety of reasons, one of the most obvious being that our culture prizes youth and looks down on being old. People also live longer now than they used to, and death is hidden away in hospitals instead of being in front of our eyes on a regular basis.
