I start my day by taking these pills. By the end of the day, there are four more.
There’s a song made famous by the Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa that goes like this: “Time passes and we grow old, and love I no longer reflect as I did yesterday” (in a loose translation that fails to convey the idea of “nos vamos poniendo viejos”).
Aging is a universal experience. They say the only certainties in this world are death and taxes. Yet (as Spurgeon aptly put it) nothing is more uncertain than the hour of death. So, if you’re alive (and there’d be no other way for you to be reading this article), the surest thing is that you’re aging, and this process, unless interrupted by illness or accident, will stretch on for a few more years.
Old age doesn’t arrive all at once. It quietly settles in. Suddenly, we find we no longer remember names. That our bodies demand care. That our parents age and/or pass away. That some projects cease to be dreams and become memories.
The true shock isn’t losing youth; it’s discovering that time no longer seems infinite.
Youth Lives in the Illusion of Reversibility
When we’re young, we believe almost everything can be perfect. With strength, energy, and vitality, life’s horizon seems wide and distant. Worse yet, reversible.
We think there will always be time to ask for forgiveness, rebuild relationships, change careers, or correct decisions. Maturity reveals that some events are irreversible. The gospel doesn’t promise to return the past; it promises to redeem people who have a past. To redeem, simply put, is to buy a slave at a price. To free them and take them to a new plan which, in the case of Jesus and faith in Him, means the Kingdom. Here and now. Other similar words, though they don’t quite capture it, help explain what I’m getting at: Emancipation, Liberation. (In the emancipation/liberation we know, the necessary social conditions weren’t created for the emancipated to live a dignified life. Redemption addresses this more deeply, and that matters.)
The Bible Doesn’t Romanticize Old Age
In truth, the Bible doesn’t romanticize anything. It tells two stories in touching ways: the peripheral, which is the account of actions, decisions, observations, consequences of decisions—good and bad—and micro acts of redemption reaching people, families, nations. And then there’s the main account, which is the redemption accomplished by Jesus on the cross, pointing to a redemption even of creation. The important thing here: God doesn’t abandon His projects.
Texts like Ecclesiastes 12 realistically describe the body’s decay. Psalm 90 teaches us to number our days. John 21 shows Jesus announcing to Peter the gradual loss of autonomy.
Scripture honors gray hair, but never treats old age as an automatic reward or as synonymous with wisdom. Just look at the multitude of grumpy, angry, violent, bitter elderly people, resentful with God and the world, living in a nonconformity and resentment that fits well in adolescence, but not at life’s end.
Life’s changes can indeed be violent or instantaneous – a stroke, paralysis, betrayal, losing a job that changes everything, the list goes on – but the changes over which we have some kind of power are slow and painful. That’s why we often deny the need for help or the importance of seeing that doing things the same way we always have won’t yield different results.
These changes require not just a dreamed goal. They need to transform into a well-established plan. Not something like “From now on, everything will be different.” That refrain, repeated year after year on certain public TV — the year-end jingle of Rede Globo, Brazil’s largest network, promising that the new year will change everything — already shows, by February or March, that it’s not true.
Consequences Remain. Condemnation Does Not.
The Bible is full of people who sinned, obtained God’s forgiveness, and had to continue living with the consequences of their sin. Perhaps the clearest example is David.
There comes an age when we discover that we are no longer defined by our greatest successes or our greatest failures. We are defined by the grace with which God continues to write the story despite them.
David’s story shows that God forgives without erasing all consequences. Some losses remain until the end of life. David didn’t just lose the son he had with Bathsheba — her pregnancy was precisely what led David to send Uriah to the front lines — but also faced a fracture of integrity and prolonged repercussions in the royal house.
In the Bathsheba episode, after David sinned, the Bible says the LORD sent Nathan to David (2 Samuel 12). Nathan confronts David with a parable and then directly announces the consequences: that the sword would never depart from David’s house and that the child would die, and that this would happen “because” David acted that way (2 Samuel 12:1-14).
Even so, David didn’t lose the kingdom, and he wasn’t “disqualified” as king before God: he continued to be one of the leaders of the Jewish people and, despite the consequences, remained in the divine purpose.
I think few of us can understand David’s attitude when he got up from fasting as soon as the child died and went to celebrate a feast. To the casual observer, this sounds like psychopathy, or at least indifference. Generally, one expects mourning after death. Not him. Fortunately, we have the biblical explanation. That’s why I suggest reading the entire episode.
An elderly Christian can carry deep scars without continuing to live as condemned. And that is truly liberating. Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 4 show that the final word on our lives belongs to Christ, not to guilt or applause.
Aging Dismantles the Illusion of Self-Sufficiency
The greatest loss may not be physical strength, but autonomy. The body stops obeying, memory fails, others begin to care for us, privacy and independence cease to be an extremely prized and cherished asset, becoming a bargaining chip with the maintenance of life.
We discover we were never truly independent; we just managed to hide our dependence. Not anymore. Old age becomes a kind of compulsory humility.
For example, the way Jesus describes Peter’s future shows that dependence isn’t always chosen: instead of Peter following the path he wanted, there would be a time when he would be taken “where you do not want to go.” The body—and, by extension, the will—ceases to be the center of governance, and life is led by a calling that surpasses it. Thus, frailty doesn’t just appear as a flaw; it becomes a place of communion with grace and mission, because the “self” no longer bears the weight of the journey alone.
The Local Church Should Be Where Frailty Finds Communion
As dependence grows, a community capable of welcoming confession, repentance, mourning, and limitations becomes even more necessary.
Make no mistake, even the most lost of sinners needs confession. There’s a book recently published about Western snipers in Sarajevo in the 1990s. I’ll address this in another article.
Returning to the subject of mourning, confessions, limitations.
Instead of welcoming confession, repentance, mourning, and limitations, many churches expect the elderly to demonstrate permanent stability. The communion of saints should be a balm precisely when there is no going back.
And in this sense, Mary, placed under John’s care (John 19:26-27), is a good illustration: she is received, sustained, and supported by someone designated not to let frailty be isolated. If even at that moment, when Jesus’ life was being taken, Mary wasn’t “left behind,” but entrusted to care, then the church must also learn to do the same with its elderly—not as a favor, but as an expression of love that doesn’t depend on the strength of the recipient.
Christ Gives Meaning to the Time That Remains
Christian hope doesn’t consist in regaining youth or escaping reality. It consists in discovering that time, even when it takes away strength, opportunities, and autonomy, still belongs to God. Christ doesn’t eliminate finitude; He prevents it from having the final word.
Now, without romanticizing or sugarcoating the pill of aging, let’s anchor the reflection in 2 Corinthians 4:16: “Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.” The body may “stop obeying,” but the inner life isn’t left without governance: it is being rearranged, day by day.
And the same pastoral tone appears in Isaiah 46:4: “Even to your old age and gray hairs I am he, I am he who will sustain you.” God doesn’t withdraw when capacity diminishes; He sustains when dependence increases.
Finally, Psalm 71:9-18 puts words to a mourning that is real: it describes aging and decline, but doesn’t silence the testimony of support. Old age may hurt—yet the hand that sustains doesn’t change.
Aging, however, isn’t just “gradual” finitude; there are days when a kind of inner night arrives. In Alzheimer’s, memory breaks, words are lost, and sometimes the brain no longer seems to reach stimuli as before. In those moments, God’s promise isn’t that the mind will function again, but that He keeps in peace those who persevere.
There may come a day when our minds can no longer remain steadfast in Him. It’s no longer a cognitive ability the person controls; it’s something sustained by love: through prayer, presence, reading, music, patient care.
When the time comes when “not even the brain seems to respond,” yet communion can happen through paths that transcend conscious thought: a familiar song, the tone of voice, a gospel phrase spoken consistently, a whispered prayer. I’ve seen this in people who no longer spoke due to Alzheimer’s, but were moved—brought to tears—when the name of Jesus was announced. It wasn’t performance: it was life sustained by grace, even at the limit.
Conclusion
Aging is discovering that there are irreversible decisions, definitive losses, and limits that cannot be negotiated. It is also realizing that our dignity was never in strength, memory, or the ability to control our own lives.
There comes a time in life when we can no longer go back. But we can still move forward. Not because the past ceased to exist, nor because the losses stopped hurting.
We move forward because Christ entered our story, even the part we will never be able to rewrite. Time keeps passing. We will continue to age. But we no longer walk towards emptiness. We walk towards the One who promised: “Even to your old age and gray hairs I am he… I will sustain you.” (Isaiah 46:4)