The women discussed people’s tendency to see growing older as growing more irrelevant, to think that older people should be out of sight, and to view the increasing limitations and weaknesses of their bodies as being a burden on those who have to care for them.
Kruger shared her personal experience with social media impacting her negatively. “I was thinking the other day [about] how much I am being shaped by Instagram,” she said. “I normally think of it as, ‘Oh, the poor young girls who are being shaped by Instagram,’ right?”
“Yet I’m realizing, ‘Oh, it really is impacting me,’” she said. “Like, I’m looking to see, what should a 50-year-old look like? And, to be honest, we live in public spaces, so it can be intimidating. Will I lose value?”
“There’s a whole industry” that pushes us toward preserving our physical youth, said Wilkin, but “what the Bible tells us is [you’ve] got to pay attention to the truth of your age, no matter how you feel.”
She pointed out that we are so focused on being physically attractive that “the highest compliment you can pay to a woman in our age demographic is that you don’t look your age.”
“Rather than, ‘I’m so blessed to have had that conversation with you because of the wisdom you gave to me,’” Kruger agreed.
Wilkin tied our view of aging to how we see technology, where the newest innovations are prized and older technology is obsolete. However, there is wisdom that comes with growing older.
Aging and Church Discipleship
When it comes to discipling believers to age well, Jen Wilkin emphasized that people’s choices in this area matter because those choices impact others. “There’s no such thing as a decision that only impacts you,” she said.
“It’s never been more needed than now,” said Doctor, “to say, ‘Let me at least show you an option of aging without…taking advantage of all of the opportunities we have to look as if we’re not aging.’”
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Wilkin believes that people who were very attractive in their youth tend to have a more difficult time with aging. “People understand intuitively that to be attractive is to command a form of power, which means that the aging process is, at bare minimum, the relinquishing of a form of power,” she said. “But I would argue, and I know you guys would say, it’s also the taking up of another more lasting and significant form of power, for lack of a better word.” That power is the wisdom that comes with time.
However, just because people get older does not mean that they grow wiser. In fact, aging reveals how people have decided to live their lives. After describing older people they knew who had grown more beautiful over time and gained a certain “luminosity,” Wilkin pointed out, “We are all developing towards something.”
