Time Makes Us Older

I'm in the part of my life when aging seems to be front of mind. There is a strange headspace about this aspect of time (and what it offers). This specific relationship with time we often resist. Aging is an incredibly personal journey each of us takes, and yet it is also done in a public way since we take our bodies, skin, faces, hair, out into the world on a daily basis. We can’t always hide what time is doing to our exteriors. More and more the greater world seems to be telling me to hide this part of my relationship with time. I am being sold so many commodities that promise to reverse this relationship. But do I want this relationship reversed? Do I want to turn back the clock? To stay forever young? Then what?

No one is supposed to want to die and yet, as Christians, we know that the closer we get to the end of this life, a new one begins. A better one. A life without earthly groaning bodies, without drooping skin and sagging backs. While it’s my earthly conditioned way to resist the signs of aging, it might be my heavenly calling to embrace them as one step closer to the one who knit me from the beginning.

When we read the start of our story in Genesis 1 we see that God has a clear plan. He is creating the world with a sense of order. Light and darkness, creating time. Form from the void, creating the earth as a foundation under our feet. Plants and vegetation, allowing for a livable ecosystem. Animals…and then human(s). Genesis 1:26 says, “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” When God creates humanity he makes an interesting declaration, he decides they will be like God. I wish I knew in what way but I don’t. So I’m only left to speculate on what God might have meant when he said this. I doubt we look like God, as he is not bound to an earthly body (aside from Jesus’ brief stint here on earth). So that leaves me to wonder about their souls. Eternal perhaps. Their bodies were likely always headed for the grave. But their souls were always heaven bound.

My resistance to age is a cry of defiance to God. It is an arguing with his divine plan from the beginning—that I would join him one day in heaven. It is a reluctance to vacate the space I occupy in order to make room for the next. But of course, I argue, my attempt to look younger isn’t really about all of that. I know I don’t want to live forever. It’s about doing my best to take care of what I’ve been given. To treat my body as the temple.

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own,  for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20

Or at least that’s what I fall back on when called out about my vanity or the amounts of money I’m willing to spend on elixers that have impossible promises attached to their labels. I’m treating my body as a temple! I say with a bit of indignance. After all, it’s a full time job taking care of this temple. There’s the physical conditioning of my temple—running, tennis, strength training, stretching. As well as the nutritional demands—eat your greens! It only makes sense that I take pride in the results of all of this hard work. That I want certain physical payoffs for taking care of my temple. So where is the truth? Bad news—I don’t know. But I do know that at some point, the temple of the Holy Spirit transforms into a temple for myself. I am creating a temple for an idol of appearance. And I know what God says about idols. It’s not good.

All who fashion idols are nothing, and the things they delight in do not profit.
Isaiah 44:9

Like so many things in our faith, there are not always clear answers. But the beauty in the not knowing is that it makes us lean in. It challenges us to think and discern. And in this case, when it comes to the response to our aging bodies, it does just that. I don’t know where the line is. I don’t think God sees the beauty of our exteriors as valuable, he is always seeing the beauty of the souls we are shaping. And while we might not think much about how our resistance to aging is shaping our soul…it is. So perhaps that is our first step in discerning his will—asking how our exterior concerns and decisions are shaping our interior character.