For the last several weeks Bill and I have been working on our documentary, Insights Into Aging Parents and Loss. Even though it has been a bit emotional for us, telling the stories of the aging process of each parent has been enlightening for our own journey in aging.
420 minutes, 9 days, 10 years and a lifetime have been the amounts of time allotted for Bill and I to prepare for the aging of each parent. Each experience had its own trail of emotions. As we have looked back over the journeys, the forks in the road, the markers of lessons learned, and the view from the end of the path, we have built perspectives on aging. As a good friend shared, we are the youth of the aging population, which basically means we will be there before we know it.
In the process of sharing the stories, two truths have stood out to me. First of all, the occurrence of acquired disabilities among the aging. In your youth it is easy to set yourself among the able-bodied, but there is no way to predict what may come your way during the aging process: hearing loss, visual impairment, mobility challenges and a lack of cognitive acuity to name a few. Secondly, with any of those challenges, you may find yourself in the margins.
Grace Without Margins among the elderly means continuing to make your church building a welcoming and accessible home. It means including the elderly in conversations, even if you have to repeat yourself a few times. It means sitting and listening to the wisdom and faith of an elderly person with the same enthusiasm of listening to a peer. And it means putting yourself on that same journey and thinking about how you would want to be included.
In the book, Improving With Age, Stuart and Jill Broscoe share the verse, Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. ( II Corinthians 4:16) The attitude of being renewed day by day starts in your 50's, the youth of the aging population, or in other words, "the young old." As we start this journey we have to ask ourselves if we are focusing on wasting away or being renewed day by day?
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