75 Sermon Illustrations on Elderly

Wearing a shower cap only moments from entering the baptismal waters, Ophelia White was beaming with excitement. With the encouragement of friends gathered in the Cook Baptist Church worship center, the 94-year-old new believer was baptized, answering the prayers of those closest to her.

“I want people to know it’s never too late,” White said. “Get with it.”

When she was a young girl, White’s mother urged her to go forward and ask to be baptized. Not fully realizing why she was doing so, White obliged and for decades believed she had a relationship with Christ.

Joy Campbell, who has shared a house with White for several years in Ruston, Louisiana, became increasingly aware this year that White lacked the confidence of Jesus in her life. So, Campbell took a bold step and asked White if she knew Christ as her personal Lord and Savior.

For several weeks, Campbell continued the spiritual conversations and prayed for her roommate until one day in August when White made the decision that she indeed needed Jesus and publicly announced her profession of faith to the congregation at Cook Baptist.

The news stirred joy inside Campbell and brought back memories of another person she knew who embraced a relationship with Christ. Campbell had been married to her husband Henry for 34 years when she realized he did not know Jesus. A deacon at the time, he admitted he did not have a saving knowledge of Christ. So in 1980, at age 64, Henry Campbell professed Jesus as his Lord and Savior. From that point until his death in 2010 Henry exhibited the change in his life because of his faith in Christ.

“I was surprised he wasn’t a Christian because he had been serving in the church so long,” Campbell said. “We as Christians need to realize that some of our people are active in service but don’t know Jesus.”

“So I began praying for him and he one day accepted Christ,” she continued. “With my husband and Ophelia, it was a reminder that it’s never too late to become a Christian and that you should never give up on a person. It takes time, a lot of time.”

White’s baptism came as an encouragement for the Cook Baptist congregation not just as a reminder that it is never too late to accept Jesus. It also is evidence of how the witness of a close friend can be a catalyst for a lost person to become a Christian, said Todd Free, the church’s discipleship and administration pastor.

“It’s inspiring to people, particularly for senior adults, to know that God is still touching hearts even in the elderly years,” Free said.

“There are many others like Mrs. White who went their whole life thinking they knew Christ but understood later their need for Him.

“I’m praying we have others in our congregation who have a similar story will have the courage to do as Mrs. White,” Free said. “We see her testimony as a gift from God to our church and are grateful He allowed us to be a part of this.”

It may be rare, but even old fogies can get saved.

Greg Boyd grew up Catholic, became an atheist, then got saved. He earned a Ph.D. at Princeton Theological Seminary and became the pastor of a large church.

One thing that burdened him is that his father did not believe in God. He was getting up there in years and Greg decided to do something about it. He challenged his father to write him letters that laid out his biggest objections to faith. Greg answered those questions as best he could.

They covered some big areas, like how can you know the Bible is true, and how do you explain all the suffering in the world. It wasn’t just hypothetical stuff - his father’s wife, Greg’s mom, had died when the kids were very small. Edward had strong reasons not to believe in God.

After many letters passed back and forth, a miracle happened - Edward accepted Jesus as his savior. He spent the last ten years of his life as a dedicated Christian.

________

Adapted from the book "Letters from a Skeptic: A Son Wrestles with His Father's Questions about Christianity," by Dr. Gregory A. Boyd and Edward K. Boyd.

Once there was a little old man. His eyes blinked and his hands trembled; when he ate he clattered the silverware distressingly, missed his mouth with the spoon as often as not, and dribbled a bit of his food on the tablecloth. Now he lived with his married son, having nowhere else to live, and his son's wife didn't like the arrangement.

"I can't have this," she said. "It interferes with my right to happiness." So she and her husband took the old man gently but firmly by the arm and led him to the corner of the kitchen. There they set him on a stool and gave him his food in an earthenware bowl. From then on he always ate in the corner, blinking at the table with wistful eyes.

One day his hands trembled rather more than usual, and the earthenware bowl fell and broke.

"If you are a pig," said the daughter-in-law, "you must eat out of a trough." So they made him a little wooden trough, and he got his meals in that.

These people had a four-year-old son of whom they were very fond. One evening the young man noticed his boy playing intently with some bits of wood and asked what he was doing.

"I'm making a trough," he said, smiling up for approval, "to feed you and Mamma out of when I get big."

The man and his wife looked at each other for a while and didn't say anything. Then they cried a little. Then they went to the corner and took the old man by the arm and led him back to the table. They sat him in a comfortable chair and gave him his food on a plate, and from then on nobody ever scolded when he clattered or spilled or broke things.

One of Grimm's fairy tales, this anecdote has the crudity of the old, simple days. But perhaps crudity is what we need to illustrate the naked and crude point of the fifth commandment: honor your parents, lest your children dishonor you. Or, in other words, a society that destroys the family destroys itself.

_____________________________

Illustrations For Preaching & Teaching

Editor Craig Brian Larson, Baker Books, pp. 170-171.

#1873

*

Older is not necessarily wiser. You’re never more open to new experience than when you’re 20. After that, the need to make money, the fear of having no work, the demands of children, the sense that the world is moving in strange new directions, the appearance of unfamiliar forms of expression that inevitably seem less wonderful than the ones that changed your life when you were 20 cause the aperture to slowly narrow.

By 50, the obvious fact of your own decline is easily mistaken for an intimation of the world’s. And, since there’s never a shortage of evidence that things are, indeed, worse than they used to be, it’s incredibly satisfying to indulge the idea, and easy to confuse it with a veteran’s seasoned judgment.

________

Packer's article can be found at .

Grumpy old men and women may not be so grumpy after all. Two new studies report that older people are better at getting along with others than younger people are, and much more content in their interpersonal relationships.

In one study, the researchers conducted lengthy interviews with 184 people ages 13 to 99 to determine how they solved interpersonal problems. Even after controlling for factors like sex and health, they found that the adults who were older than 80 were more likely to avoid conflict by waiting until things improved, while the younger people more often chose to leave in anger or engage in yelling and name-calling.

The older people, the researchers found, had fewer interpersonal difficulties to begin with, and when problems arose, they experienced less negative emotion and behaved less aggressively. The study appears in the May issue of The Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences.

The second study, scheduled for publication in the June issue of Psychology and Aging, involved more than 1,000 people ages 25 to 74 who completed eight successive days of phone interviews, a technique that the authors believe produces more reliable recollections.

The results were similar: people 60 and older were better at regulating their reactions to interpersonal tension than younger adults, even with similar intensity and frequency of stressful situations.

“Although people often think of older adults as ornery, they're actually nicer when they have problems in their relationships,” said Dr. Kira S. Birditt, a research fellow at the University of Michigan and the lead author on the two studies. “When they do feel upset, they're more likely to wait to see if things improve than to yell or argue.”

It is widely believed that men and women often respond differently to interpersonal stress - men by withdrawing and women by insisting on a solution. And some research confirms this premise.

But the two studies found no such variation between the sexes.

Moreover, Dr. Birditt pointed out that older adults of both sexes appeared to be better at handling conflict not only with family but with co-workers, neighbors and acquaintances.

“The type of relationship didn't matter,” she said. “Older people are just better at it.”

And while confronting issues openly is often viewed as the best way to handle interpersonal problems, older adults often avoid this approach.

“It may be that avoiding problems is good for relationships,” Dr. Birditt said. “Particularly if it's a personality issue, something unlikely to change, it may be helpful to just ignore it.”

The researchers point to several limitations of their study.

They concede that having people report on their actions or feelings can bias the findings because people may only report what is socially acceptable.

They also mention that older adults may remember the past more favorably than younger people.

In addition, the results may be influenced by the fact that constructive strategies may have survival value, and that people who use destructive strategies either do not stay together or do not live as long as those who find ways to get along.

“Over all,” Dr. Birditt concluded, “older people are experiencing less anger and less stress, and using less aggressive strategies when they have problems in their relationships.

“It might be that relationships get better as we age.”

According to new research, maybe the “golden years” can really be golden after all. I’ll explain.

When you hear the words “old age,” what comes to mind? In cultures gone by, it meant wisdom, sage, elder, respect. But today in our youth-obsessed culture, we tend to think of “decline,” “frailty,” “sickness,” and “death.” Many believe that the hobbit Bilbo had old age pegged when he said in The Lord of the Rings, “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”

And recently Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the architects of Obamacare, said in The Atlantic that he wanted to die at age 75. Living too long, he thinks, “renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining ... It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world ... We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.”

This sort of thinking has not only made a lucrative industry out of anti-aging products, but it’s driving the whole so-called “death with dignity” movement.

Of course, there’s no denying that old age is a stage of life — the last stage, in fact — and it comes with a whole host of unpleasant things: the loss of mobility, loved ones, and so on.

But according to a growing body of research, if folks like Emanuel get their wish, our culture will be robbed of some of the happiest years of our lives. Researcher Jonathan Rauch and others have noted the persistence of what they call “the U-Curve.” In the U.S. and in scores of countries, young adults tend to rate themselves as very happy, but the older they get, up to age 50, the less happy they become.

This may be due to the accumulation of life stress, the mismatch of early dreams with reality, and so on. But as people begin the journey into older age, reported happiness actually begins to increase again. The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago has found that nearly 40 percent of Americans aged 65 and older described themselves as “very happy,” compared with just 33 percent of those between 35 and 49.

New York Times columnist David Brooks says that many psychologists attribute this boost in well-being to natural changes in the brain. And while there may be some truth to this, I agree with Brooks’ opinion, “that elder happiness is an accomplishment, not a condition, that people get better at living through effort, by mastering specific skills.”

The first life skill he notes is bifocalism, the ability to see a situation from multiple perspectives. That only comes with experience. Next is lightness, the ability to be at ease with the downsides of life. Again, the accumulation of years can help us not take ourselves so seriously. And then there’s the acquired wisdom of responding to competing demands. Finally, Brooks notes that older people often have an intuitive grasp of what other people are thinking, leading to greater empathy. All these benefits can come with advancing years, leading to increased happiness and contentment.

Of course, Chuck Colson often pointed out that happiness is not the mere pursuit of good experiences or feelings, but the classically understood “good life”, or the deliberate acquisition of virtue, which these research findings corroborate. Wisdom, ultimately, comes from the Lord. As the psalmist said, “What man is there who desires life / and loves many days, that he may see good? / Keep your tongue from evil / and your lips from speaking deceit. / Turn away from evil and do good; / seek peace and pursue it.” (Psalm 34:12-14)

Virtue is the mark of a life well lived, and it takes a lifetime to cultivate. Christians, whatever our age, are to seek the wisdom that only God can provide.

________

Resources:

The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis

< http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/12/the-real-roots-of-midlife-crisis/382235>

Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic, November 17, 2014

Why Elders Smile

David Brooks, New York Times, December 4, 2014

Happiness and Virtue: Life Well Lived

Chuck Colson, BreakPoint.org, April 14, 2010

Why I Hope to Die at 75

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, The Atlantic, December 2014

The happiness curve

Robert J. Samuelson, Washington Post, December 7, 2014

________

Copyright (c) 2014 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Grumpy old men and women may not be so grumpy after all. Two new studies report that older people are better at getting along with others than younger people are, and much more content in their interpersonal relationships.

In one study, the researchers conducted lengthy interviews with 184 people ages 13 to 99 to determine how they solved interpersonal problems. Even after controlling for factors like sex and health, they found that the adults who were older than 80 were more likely to avoid conflict by waiting until things improved, while the younger people more often chose to leave in anger or engage in yelling and name-calling.

The older people, the researchers found, had fewer interpersonal difficulties to begin with, and when problems arose, they experienced less negative emotion and behaved less aggressively. The study appears in the May issue of The Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences.

The second study, scheduled for publication in the June issue of Psychology and Aging, involved more than 1,000 people ages 25 to 74 who completed eight successive days of phone interviews, a technique that the authors believe produces more reliable recollections.

The results were similar: people 60 and older were better at regulating their reactions to interpersonal tension than younger adults, even with similar intensity and frequency of stressful situations.

“Although people often think of older adults as ornery, they're actually nicer when they have problems in their relationships,” said Dr. Kira S. Birditt, a research fellow at the University of Michigan and the lead author on the two studies. “When they do feel upset, they're more likely to wait to see if things improve than to yell or argue.”

It is widely believed that men and women often respond differently to interpersonal stress - men by withdrawing and women by insisting on a solution. And some research confirms this premise.

But the two studies found no such variation between the sexes.

Moreover, Dr. Birditt pointed out that older adults of both sexes appeared to be better at handling conflict not only with family but with co-workers, neighbors and acquaintances.

“The type of relationship didn't matter,” she said. “Older people are just better at it.”

And while confronting issues openly is often viewed as the best way to handle interpersonal problems, older adults often avoid this approach.

“It may be that avoiding problems is good for relationships,” Dr. Birditt said. “Particularly if it's a personality issue, something unlikely to change, it may be helpful to just ignore it.”

The researchers point to several limitations of their study.

They concede that having people report on their actions or feelings can bias the findings because people may only report what is socially acceptable.

They also mention that older adults may remember the past more favorably than younger people.

In addition, the results may be influenced by the fact that constructive strategies may have survival value, and that people who use destructive strategies either do not stay together or do not live as long as those who find ways to get along.

“Over all,” Dr. Birditt concluded, “older people are experiencing less anger and less stress, and using less aggressive strategies when they have problems in their relationships.

“It might be that relationships get better as we age.”

Defeatists say ‘Yesterday’; winners say ‘Yes’ today. It’s too late to lament the past. That’s lost forever. But it’s never too late to move into overdrive. The present is ours to charge with defiant faith.

• ‘You’re too old,’ the mission board told a rejected candidate. God, who’s a little older than most of us, must have thought she was too young. He waited two more years before sending her to the field.

• Perhaps you have heard it calculated that John Wesley preached over 40,000 sermons and traveled 225,000 miles (his horse had never heard of kilometres). Did you realize these figures belong only to the latter part of his life, from age 36 to 88?

• I was impressed; until reading George Muller’s figures. He is said to have traveled 200,000 miles, using his linguistic ability to preach in several languages to an estimated three million people. Now admittedly, Muller traveled extensively overseas. If I had a choice between travelling a thousand miles on horseback or a thousand miles by sailing ship, I’d go by plane. But here’s the spice: Muller’s statistics only began after his seventieth birthday and continued for the next 17 years.

• Dr. Robert Lowry, renowned for many accomplishments as a Christian musician, first undertook the serious study of music after turning 40.

• Fanny Crosby was forty-three when she found her life’s work – she wrote her first Gospel song. So many songs followed, under so many different pen-names, that no one could keep track of them. Informed estimates range to beyond 8,000 (some say 9.000), with more than a hundred pseudonyms.

• Francis Schaeffer was little known until he was in his fifties.

• Child Evangelism Fellowship was founded by a sixty-year-old, who remained at its helm for the next 15 years.

• At 63, Clara McBride Hale began caring for addict babies. The number she has helped now runs into the hundreds.

• Peggy Smith, 84 and blind, and her sister Christine, 82 and crippled, were key people in the world-famous revival in the Scottish Hebrides.

• Elizabeth Wilson felt the tug of China when she was 20. She arrived thirty years later. Conditions were harsh and dangerous, yet her age proved a treasured asset. The Lord had called her to the Orient, where — as in most societies outside our own — age is honored. Paul Kuo presented the administrators of Hong Kong Theological College with a headache. He was already 60 and he wanted to enroll. By the time he graduated he would be too old for any church to want him. He was reluctantly admitted and although he learned, he failed to obtain a degree. In 1975 he left for Thailand’s ‘Golden Triangle’ to labor for Christ amongst mercenaries, bandits and opium farmers. His past military training earned him respect and his age made him a celebrity. He dived so deeply into ministry that he soon had to recruit other missionaries. Before long, Paul was heading up a large missionary venture.

• In 1968, two middle-aged tourists, florists for over 30 years, were so moved by what they saw in Kenya that they decided to return as missionaries. Denny and Jeanne Grindall, with no engineering skills or even formal Bible training and very little money, instigated the building of a dam almost 80 foot high and piped the clean water nearly three miles to tribespeople. The Maasai gradually became so responsive to the Grindall’s message that twenty churches were opened and hundreds came to Christ.

• I received the following e-mail from Gordon Ogden: Please pray for my ministry in marriage and family counseling. (I am 70.) Today I will work with child sexual abuse, teenage depression, adult depression, and marital discord. My weeks are filled with such. Then just when I was about to elevate my new friend to megastar status he spoilt it with his next e-mail: “Tomorrow I go to Monterey to see my friend Phillip, a Marriage, Family, Child Counselor like myself. He is currently running two recovery groups, plus his individual counseling, plus working out at the gym three days a week, plus attending conferences and driving all over the place. Phillip will be 90 in June. What a role model for a guy 20 years his junior.”

• Black American missionary to Liberia, Eliza George, was forced by her mission to retire at age 65. Undeterred, she raised her own support and continued independently for the best part of three more decades.

• ‘I want to go to the mission field as soon as I can,’ announced an enthusiastic teenager on the day of her baptism. She made it — as a seventy-one-year-old widow. In Papua New Guinea, Guatemala, Thailand, Burma and Communist Russia, Margaret Cole squeezed more excitement into a few years than most people ever see.

• Cam Townsend, founder of the Wycliffe Bible Translators, flew to Moscow and began learning Russian to assist in Bible translation work in the Caucasus. The nation was still under the iron grip of Communism and he was seventy-two.

• At that same age of seventy-two, Maude Cary accepted her missionary society’s plea ‘to open the city of El Haheb [in Morocco] to resident missionary work.’

• Evelyn Brand came to India as a young missionary. After her husband’s death she pressed on, living on a pittance, caring for villagers scattered over five mountain ranges. At age seventy-five, Granny, as she was now known, had grown too old for such arduous work. Having fallen and broken her hip, she had to be carried down the mountain by stretcher, then driven 150 bone-jarring miles to the nearest hospital. By the time her son – a brilliant medical missionary – finally arrived, she was walking with two canes and managing to ride a pony to outlying villages. The skilled doctor mustered all his persuasive powers to lovingly convince his aging mother that she ‘presented a constant medical hazard,’ riding horseback to such remote, rugged mountains with her paralyzed legs and deficient sense of balance. Brushing aside his pleas, Granny toiled for eighteen more years, despite being ravaged by tropical diseases and suffering concussions and fractures from falls off her pony. She was ninety-three when she reluctantly exchanged her horse for a stretcher; continuing her work by being carried from village to village by devoted Indians for her two remaining years.

• In modern China the seventy-year-old wife of a persecuted pastor travels extensively distributing Bibles at great risk. In another part of the nation a ninety-year-old prayerfully studies a map, wondering where to lug her next bundle of Bibles. She hugs her books, rejoicing that the Tiananmen Square massacre increased not just the danger but the demand.

Think of it this way: if growing old is as bad as is sometimes claimed, how come so many people do it?

I don’t care if you’re so long in the tooth you’ve blown your entire savings on toothpaste; so out of touch that you’re fazed by newfangled things like the King James Bible; so old your grandchildren are in nursing homes; so frail you have to rest up to watch television: God can still use you. Of course, if you’ve already passed eighty-five, I can’t promise you’ll write 8,000 songs. You might, like Fanny at that age, have to settle for only 250 hymns a year.

• If you’re ninety-one and still don’t know what you’ll do when you grow up, throw a party. If you’re ninety-five, it’s time to go to Bible School. That’s what David Sizer did. The last I heard, he was 101, still preaching in a prison and five retirement centers every week.

• Dr. Bernhard Johnson tells of a tiny Negro in Brazil aged 105 who had led hundreds to the Lord. Uninspired? A further detail should cure that. He did not know the Lord until he turned 103.

So if you’ve graduated from make-up to poly-filler, hang on to your dentures, it’s ministry time.

In Christ, Invincible

You’re fruit

Dawn glowing brighter.

growing sweeter,

Wine gaining value.

Not milk turning sour

Or cardboard caving,

Colours fading,

Under the weight of time.

You’re concrete drying stronger,

Trees growing higher.

For us over middle age (or even those almost there) and all you others, check out this version of “Jesus Loves Me”.

JESUS LOVES ME (Senior Version)

Jesus loves me, this I know,

Though my hair is white as snow.

Though my sight is growing dim,

Still He bids me trust in Him.

(CHORUS)

YES, JESUS LOVES ME... YES, JESUS LOVES ME...

YES, JESUS LOVES ME FOR THE BIBLE TEL LS ME SO.

Though my steps are oh, so slow,

With my hand in His I’ll go

On through life, let come what may,

He’ll be there to lead the way.

(CHORUS)

Though I am no longer young,

I have much which He’s begun.

Let me serve Christ with a smile,

Go with others the extra mile.

(CHORUS)

When the nights are dark and long,

In my heart He puts a song.

Telling me in words so clear,

“Have no fear, for I am near.”

(CHORUS)

When my work on earth is done,

And life’s victories have been won.

He will take me home above,

Then I’ll understand His love

(CHORUS)

I love Jesus, does He know?

Have I ever told Him so?

Jesus loves to hear me say,

That I love Him every day.

More than 70 years after she started school, a 94-year-old Kansas woman will soon be the world’s oldest college graduate. Nola Ochs, who is 95, first went to college in the 1930 but dropped out to get married and have a family. Recently she decided to complete what she had started. If all goes well, she will graduate from Fort Hays State University in the same class as her granddaughter.

Asked for some words of wisdom, Ochs simply said, “I give thanks to the Lord and try to live day by day. I try to do whatever is pleasing to Him. That’s what I want to do.”

It’s never too late to sharpen your mind!

Older is not necessarily wiser. You’re never more open to new experience than when you’re 20. After that, the need to make money, the fear of having no work, the demands of children, the sense that the world is moving in strange new directions, the appearance of unfamiliar forms of expression that inevitably seem less wonderful than the ones that changed your life when you were 20 cause the aperture to slowly narrow.

By 50, the obvious fact of your own decline is easily mistaken for an intimation of the world’s. And, since there’s never a shortage of evidence that things are, indeed, worse than they used to be, it’s incredibly satisfying to indulge the idea, and easy to confuse it with a veteran’s seasoned judgment.

________

Packer's article can be found at .

According to new research, maybe the “golden years” can really be golden after all. I’ll explain.

When you hear the words “old age,” what comes to mind? In cultures gone by, it meant wisdom, sage, elder, respect. But today in our youth-obsessed culture, we tend to think of “decline,” “frailty,” “sickness,” and “death.” Many believe that the hobbit Bilbo had old age pegged when he said in The Lord of the Rings, “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”

And recently Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the architects of Obamacare, said in The Atlantic that he wanted to die at age 75. Living too long, he thinks, “renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining ... It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world ... We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.”

This sort of thinking has not only made a lucrative industry out of anti-aging products, but it’s driving the whole so-called “death with dignity” movement.

Of course, there’s no denying that old age is a stage of life — the last stage, in fact — and it comes with a whole host of unpleasant things: the loss of mobility, loved ones, and so on.

But according to a growing body of research, if folks like Emanuel get their wish, our culture will be robbed of some of the happiest years of our lives. Researcher Jonathan Rauch and others have noted the persistence of what they call “the U-Curve.” In the U.S. and in scores of countries, young adults tend to rate themselves as very happy, but the older they get, up to age 50, the less happy they become.

This may be due to the accumulation of life stress, the mismatch of early dreams with reality, and so on. But as people begin the journey into older age, reported happiness actually begins to increase again. The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago has found that nearly 40 percent of Americans aged 65 and older described themselves as “very happy,” compared with just 33 percent of those between 35 and 49.

New York Times columnist David Brooks says that many psychologists attribute this boost in well-being to natural changes in the brain. And while there may be some truth to this, I agree with Brooks’ opinion, “that elder happiness is an accomplishment, not a condition, that people get better at living through effort, by mastering specific skills.”

The first life skill he notes is bifocalism, the ability to see a situation from multiple perspectives. That only comes with experience. Next is lightness, the ability to be at ease with the downsides of life. Again, the accumulation of years can help us not take ourselves so seriously. And then there’s the acquired wisdom of responding to competing demands. Finally, Brooks notes that older people often have an intuitive grasp of what other people are thinking, leading to greater empathy. All these benefits can come with advancing years, leading to increased happiness and contentment.

Of course, Chuck Colson often pointed out that happiness is not the mere pursuit of good experiences or feelings, but the classically understood “good life”, or the deliberate acquisition of virtue, which these research findings corroborate. Wisdom, ultimately, comes from the Lord. As the psalmist said, “What man is there who desires life / and loves many days, that he may see good? / Keep your tongue from evil / and your lips from speaking deceit. / Turn away from evil and do good; / seek peace and pursue it.” (Psalm 34:12-14)

Virtue is the mark of a life well lived, and it takes a lifetime to cultivate. Christians, whatever our age, are to seek the wisdom that only God can provide.

________

Resources:

The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis

< http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/12/the-real-roots-of-midlife-crisis/382235>

Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic, November 17, 2014

Why Elders Smile

David Brooks, New York Times, December 4, 2014

Happiness and Virtue: Life Well Lived

Chuck Colson, BreakPoint.org, April 14, 2010

Why I Hope to Die at 75

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, The Atlantic, December 2014

The happiness curve

Robert J. Samuelson, Washington Post, December 7, 2014

________

Copyright (c) 2014 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.