Stages Of Life

“The glory of young men is their strength, but the splendor of old men is their gray hair.” – Proverbs 20:29

The Bible Study Fellowship I attended in Virginia was composed mostly of women with, well, gray hair. They would look at me, sleep-deprived, nursing, pregnant, hauling toddlers and diaper bags, or all of the above, and say fondly, “the days are long but the years are short.” I’ll never forget how excited the women in my group were for each new baby I had, how special they made me feel. I was able to emerge from my life of surviving from one nap to the next long enough to hear their wisdom: value the stage that you’re in because it won’t last forever and one day you will miss it.

Our society values youth, almost to the point of being pathological about it, but Proverbs recognizes the strengths of every stage of life. The Hebrew words used here for “glory” and “splendor” both essentially mean beauty. If you look them up in a lexicon, they define each other: the word for glory can also mean splendor; the word for splendor can also mean glory. Yet they are different words. There is a unique kind of beauty to be admired and valued in each stage of life. As Tim Keller writes, “The young have a strength and an unwearied ambition that older people cannot muster. The old have a perspective, wisdom and dignity that younger people have yet to acquire. These are all distinct goods that should be enjoyed in their time.”

We should enjoy these goods. We should look for the beauty in our stage of life. Today I hugged Emmy, the only one who still has some baby fat, a little harder. I noticed Ellie’s goofy theatrics, Eric’s irrepressible energy, and Elijah’s quiet curiosity. They will probably not be so open and unfiltered about sharing these things with me forever. And we should spend time with people in other stages of life, for the wisdom, energy and perspective they can offer. 

We do tend, though, to long for the stages of life we’re not in. No stage is perfect, but one day, our bodies will be resurrected and redeemed. There will be revealed a kind of glory, beauty and splendor that leaves no room for longing (Romans 8:18-23). J. R. R. Tolkien captures a bit of this in his description of the death of Aragorn: “Then a great beauty was revealed in him, so that all who after came there looked on him with wonder; for they saw the grace of his youth, and the valor of his manhood, and the wisdom and majesty of his age were all blended together. And long there he lay, an image of the splendor of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world.”