Please Don't Let Me Get Old!

Julia Ward Howe once wrote: “Do not fear age, the sugar of life is at the bottom of the cup.” But always we seems to believe that it must be in someone else’s cup! “What can I do?” I complain. “I’m getting too old!”

But we forget, that Verdi wrote an opera at the age of 80 and Goethe finished writing “Faust” at that same age. Oliver Wendell Holmes was still writing brilliant opinions at 90. Louis Pasteur was past 60 when he began his studies that led to a cure for rabies. A lovely woman doctor near our Chicago church was still going strong at the age of 89. She flew up to Canada every Summer to fish and hunt elk.

But by that same token, some people are old at the age of 30. They look old, they act old, and they give you the impression that life has passed them by, and they never took a shot at it. Of course, there are also those Methuselahs, who live for 969 years, and might just as well never have tried. They leave no record of ever singing the praises of a morning sunrise, or ever set much of an example to their children or grandchildren. They just take the record in birthdays, and nothing else. Why do such people have to live at all?

Which really brings us to the conclusion, that life is not so much years, as it is values. What really counts is not how long you live, but how you live…not whether you achieve a thousand inventions, but whether you achieve a beautiful spirit. Some people do more living in 30 years than others do in a hundred.

I’d like to be 20 again, but I’m really way up there in age. I could wish for the moon, but this is who I really am. Let’s face it, God doesn’t desert us at the age of 80. It’s a marvelous blooming world out there, and this just might be my time to “bloom”. There is still “sugar in the cup”.