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As we get older we don’t get any younger – an oxymoron indeed! Nevertheless, we’re cheered by such remarks as that of Malcolm Muggeridge (the one-time journalist and broadcaster), who said, ‘One of the many pleasures of old age is giving things up.’ And you ladies will appreciate what Agatha Christie, the authoress, said of her husband: ‘An archaeologist is the best husband any woman can have – the older she gets, the more interested he is in her!’ Of old age, some anonymous soul resignedly wrote:
‘My deafness I can endure,
to dentures I’m resigned.
Bi-focals I can manage,
but, O God, how I miss my mind!’
One of the things about life is that you can’t measure it in years. The length of life has little to do with the value of life. Alexander the Great died at the age of thirty-three, but not before he had changed the face of the world. John Keats died at twenty-six and Percy Shelley at thirty-one, but not before they had left poetry that’s still read. Franz Schubert died at thirty-one, Mozart at thirty-six, but they gave to the world music that time will never silence.
Duration is no measuring rod for life. Then, again, anyone is old enough to die who’s with God. In the New Testament, there’s a passage in 1 John, in which the author is thinking of Jesus. John says,
‘Abide in him, so that when he is revealed we may have confidence and not be put to shame before his coming’. In other words, if we live with Christ, his coming will be no interruption in life. So long as God is a stranger to us, we’re never old enough to die. But when God becomes a friend, we’re old enough to die, whether he comes for us at any time of day or night.
Let me close with someone who was surprised to read of his death in a newspaper, only because a confusion of names had occurred. Telephoning a friend, he enquired, ‘Did you see the announcement of my death in the newspaper this morning?’ ‘Yes,’ came the unexpected answer, ‘where are you speaking from?!’
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