Coming Down With Age

One of my hospice patients has AIDS.  In talking to some of my co-workers about his diagnosis, I told them I thought I had caught AGE.  It wasn't full-blown yet, bu in June I'll be 60 - not exactly ready to be put out to pasture but I can see the gate from here.

Compared to my patients, who tend to be in their 80s - one turned 106 last week - I'm still relatively young.  Relatively is the opporative word.  I can feel the difference in my energy level, my strength and stamina are waning,  I wear orthopodic inserts in my shoes and I injured my right knee just getting up off the floor after trying to get a kink out of my back.  Oh yeah, Father Time has my number.

However, that's on the outside.  On the inside, I just feel like me.  In fact, I tend to forget the outside me is much older than the inside me wants to admit.  So, when the young bucks wanted to climb of the cliff and dive into the water, I was the first one in (my head and neck aches reminded me the rest of the day).  When they are lifting heavy weights to test the limits of their strength, I'm pumping iron right with them (of course my heart is out-pumping them all and I was the first one  to reach the limit).  And, when they were drawing on a 70# combine bow, I drew it back as the bonespur in my right shoulder screamed and I yelped as the string raked across my left forearm.

Outwardly, I am wearing thin and running down, but inwardly the clock is not advancing and the miles are not adding up.  Inwardly, I am growing stronger and increasing in vitality.  I don't just mean the silly and prideful urge to prove I've still got it (whatever it is), I mean that I have a zest for life, a hope for tomorrow, an energy within that is not lessened by age or mitigate by mileage.  In my inner being, my spiritual self, "Though outwardly I am wasting away, inwardly I am being renewed day by day" (2 Cor 4:16).

Yes, physically I have come down with age and my condition is terminal.  But spiritually I have become "a new creation in Christ - the old is gone and the new is here" (1 Cor 5:7).  In Christ, all things are made new and the condition is eternal.  I'm coming down with age but rising up ageless.  Jus' Sayn.