Sweet or Sour?
For the last eight years I have worked at a surgery center, and most of our patients are on the older side. Often, they have a spouse, a friend or sibling with them in the pre-operative area. It’s always entertaining to watch the interaction between them and their guest. Friends will joke and tease each other. Siblings do the same. But the married couples with more than a few decades together fall into one of two categories: sweet or sour. The more decades they have been together, the less neutral the situation seems to be. Watching these couple’s interactions can be inspiring. A wife will reach out her delicate hand to hold her husband’s while he waits to go to procedure. Sometimes a gentleman will lean over and kiss his wife tenderly as the stretcher heads toward the operating room. Their pattern of kindness, helpfulness, and tenderness are on display. In the “sour” camp, there are curt answers, derogatory comments, and harshness. In their defense, I am seeing them in a high-pressure situation. Nonetheless, it is a study on aging—those that get sweeter with time, or those that turn a bit sour.
There is a saying about getting older . . . that we become more of what we already are. In the same way that our bones become more brittle and our joints less flexible, a similar pathology occurs to our insides. But Scripture tells us that there can be a refining process that happens as we age: “Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.” (2 Cor. 4:16 NIV). Ecclesiastes also has counsel for us on getting older and only looking back: “Do not say,’ Why were the old days better than these?’ It is not wise to ask such questions” (Ecc. 7:10, NIV). I’m not exactly sure why the Scripture tells us to avoid looking back, but I might speculate that looking back leaves you soured to the life and goodness happening before you.
I feel so honored to have had examples of men and women who have aged well, and whose souls are a contradiction to stiff joints and brittle bones. They have a gracious flexibility about them and being in their presence feels like a big hug. I want God’s Word as the unwavering foundation of my life, letting it permeate and change me with each passing decade. These people I look up to have an abiding knowledge of God’s Word AND apply it to their lives. They have gratitude for the good that is in front of them, and yet they live as if what is before them is not all there is to see. They know that this world is not their home.
The verdict is still out on how on what I will become more of in my older years. But here is what I do know . . . the social experiment that I had the privilege to see every day at work inspires me to cultivate the kindness that I see in these patients. I know they are living out fruit that has been nurtured over a lifetime. It didn’t just start when they hit retirement. I want to point my feet toward “sweet camp” . . . desiring to have a gentle answer that turns away wrath; developing patience and gentleness and kindness in the midst of strain; celebrating and elevating the good before me, and not focusing on what I wish was. I want to reject sour and brittle and inflexible. How about you?
