“How old are you?”

For reasons I do not understand, most women and some men don’t like to be asked this question. I’ll never forget the time, while visiting with a very elderly member of my former congregation, what happened when I asked her, out of curiosity I suppose, but also with a sense of awe at her long history, how old she was. She was not amused, and she snapped back that I should never ask a lady her age. Lesson learned. I am very careful about this now.

I don’t mind when people ask about my age. Every year of my life has brought challenges, joys, and experiences that I am grateful for. Although I would never want to relive the past, I appreciate that each moment, each life lesson has shaped me into the person I am today, for better or for worse. My age, a glorious 47 years as of last Friday, is not something that has ever caused me a moment of anxiety and I pray that this will continue.

In her reflections on the biblical story of Ruth, Joan Chittister observes that “early texts called age 45 ‘the meeting of past and future,’ the point at which people came to terms with who they were because, it was now clear, there was no time, no possibility of being anything else.” (Chittister, p. 33)*

I wonder if it is because I can imagine possibilities ahead of me, both in my life and in my ministry, that I remain comfortable with my age. I wonder if I will ever get to a point where I feel like there is no possibility of anything else. I hope that time never comes!

In the book of Ruth, we meet Naomi, the mother-in-law to two daughters, the three of them widowed, left alone in a world that seemed stripped of possibilities. But all three moved hopefully forward to see what God had in store for them. Chittister writes, “Weary from the burdens of her life, aware of how vulnerable she is as a woman alone in society of families, but intent on living still, Naomi refuses to give up. She is a sign of womanly wisdom, a spiritual guide, an antidote to ageism.… Railing and raging, pushing and claiming, scratching and climbing we come to the peak of our physical years, but it is what we know about life, about God, about what’s worth it and what’s not, about what’s holy and what’s not, when our bodies have lost their tensile strength and our legs have lost their timber that may be what the world needs most.” (Chittister, p. 35)

How old are you? And what are your hopes, your dreams, your possibilities?

*(Joan D. Chittister, The Story of Ruth: Twelve Moments in Every Woman’s Life (Grand Rapids: Wm B Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000)