Old Age

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Old Age

by Charles Finney

Grandpa was looking old. Farming in all types of weather had cast its shadow upon his face. His physical movements had gotten slower. His smile was now a little crooked, with a jaw somewhat sunken with age. I asked him, “Grandpa, do you find yourself looking at others your own age and thinking, Surely, I can’t look that old?”

Grandpa remarked:

“I was sitting in the waiting room of my new doctor last week. I was his first appointment. While sitting there, I ‘What year did you graduate?’ I asked. In 1909, he said. Why do you ask? ‘I was in your class!’ My new doctor then looked at me closely. Then, the doctor asked, what did you teach?

I looked at him. I asked him if he was having any aches or pains. The old doctor remarked, You know, I’m 84 years old, and my body is full of aches and pains. You’re about my age. How do you feel?

I could not resist telling him that I felt like a newborn baby. The doctor replied with an astonishing but doubting grin, Really!?

noticed his diploma on the wall, which had his full name. Suddenly, I recalled a tall, dark-haired, muscular boy with the same name that had been in my high school class nearly 50 years ago. Could this be the same boy?

When I saw him, however, I quickly discarded that thought. This gray-haired, balding man with the deeply wrinkled face was way too old to have been my classmate. Hmmm! Or could he? After he examined me, I asked him if he had attended Good Feel Cornfield High School.

Yes, I did! he said. I’m a Cornfield kid. He gleamed with pride as he shouted out the school cheer, Ahhh Shucks. Yep. No teeth, no hair, and I think I just wet my pants.’” Grandpa reminded me that age was just a number. “I am like Job in the Bible.” He quoted Job 5:26, “Thou shalt come to thy grave in a full age, like as a shock of corn cometh in its season.” He continued with Psalms 37:25, “I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.” Grandpa said, “In all my years of travels and people that I have met or read about, there is one that comes to mind. A Chinese fellow named Tao Te Ching. He said, ‘Knowing others is wisdom; Knowing the self is enlightenment.’ The others I have known were men and women that I encountered in my travels.”

“More so the men and women I read about in the Bible. Those from the Bible gave me the most wisdom. Those help to enlighten me to the Truth and feed me with knowledge, understanding, and insight.” Grandpa quoted John 14:6, “Jesus said to him, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”

He said the most important thing I have learned with my age is that our job isn’t to change the message. Our job is to let the message change us.