On being an old soul...

If I did not believe in the sovereignty of God (and I do), I might think that I was born in the wrong decade. For as long as I can remember, I have been an old soul. In fact, when I was probably 13 or 14, a family member said that I was the youngest eighty-year-old he had ever met.

He was not wrong. 

My interests have always skewed toward things of the past—antiques, big band music, black and white movies, classic cars, history in general. 

I have also had, since my earliest days, a grand appreciation for those Scripture calls “the silver-haired,” those, in my case, who were members of the Greatest Generation. It has been my privilege to count among my friends veterans of the Second World War, Holocaust survivors, and at least one Rosie the Riveter.

My friendships with these people were special. While I could commiserate with my peers about homework and problems in our social lives, my friendships with members of the Greatest Generation brought something no peer friendship could: perspective. 

These friends, who had come of age during the Great Depression, who had been sent into Hell-on-Earth war zones, who had come home to build families and a nation, these were people with experiences that brought my “big problems” down to their proper scale.

More than once, when faced with what seemed like an insurmountable obstacle, I have heard the counsel of a seasoned friend echoing in my mind. “Throughout your life,” wrote one of them, “you will have many successes and ‘also-rans’. Take them all in stride and thank God for all of them.”

Another, a survivor of the Holocaust, advised me on the matter of happiness. “I survived the Holocaust, and I still smile,” he said. “Why can’t everyone else?”

Talk about a change in perspective.

Of course, the downside to having friends much older than oneself is that the friendships are relatively brief. When I visit the cemetery, I do sometimes feel like the youngest eighty-year-old ever, as I walk from grave to grave, remembering cherished friends, an experience many my age will not have until years down the road.

Even in death, though, the lives these people lived offer a realignment to my own myopic thinking. As a 30-something, my focus is largely on the immediate—buying a house, caring for my family, mowing the lawn, taking the car in for an oil change. All necessary and good things.

But the realization that these friends are now in eternity, their bodies buried beneath the sod, causes me to consider not only where they are, but where I am and where I want to be. 

In five or six decades, when I am the silver-haired—or, more likely, the no-haired—what do I want to be able to look back on? What do I want to be true of who I am and what I have done with my vaporous life?

Moses, that great emancipator and law-giver of the Israelites, must have had this same thought in mind when he wrote Psalm 90:

“The days of our lives are seventy years; and if by reason of strength they are eighty years, yet their boast is only labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away…So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:10, 12).
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I am only a few decades in, and already I’ve had my share of lessons learned the hard way. But I am thankful for the perspective and wisdom that I’ve gleaned from my older friends. Indeed, the Lord has used their lives to teach me to number my days, so that I might gain a heart of wisdom.