Conference for senior adults emphasizes passing love along
Jerry C. Grubbs
As I began my preparation for this conference for Senior Adults, I realized that the title given me was “miss worded.” By that I mean that sharing and receiving were out of order. As I thought about this topic, it seemed to me that receiving comes first. The old adage is that we cannot give that which we do not possess. So it is with love. If we have not learned to be recipients of God’s love, then we cannot share it with others.
John says it so well when he writes: “Dear Friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God” (1 John 4:7 niv). Love comes to us from God, and it is out of the overflow of God’s love for us that we are enabled to share God’s love with others.
This movement from receiving to sharing is particularly crucial to those of us who have, by virtue of the passing years, moved into what our culture calls the senior adult years. Even when we have grown up in a loving and caring environment and have experienced receiving and sharing love for many years, we often find our senior circumstances challenging in both directions, that is, receiving and sharing.
Our Western culture doesn’t value aging or older persons. We fear aging, fight it, push it aside, and try to postpone it. We overlook persons of age, neglect them retire them, ostracize them, or institutionalize them. Of course, this is nothing new under the sun! Read Ecclesiastes 12:1–8 in the New Living Translation and you will understand that these ideas have been around for thousands of years.
Now, for another perspective on the senior years, read Psalm 92. Persons of faith know that God’s design for us is that we live life in its entirety planted in God’s spiritual garden, nurtured and nourished by God, and that we come into the final stages of our lives ripe, green, producing spiritual fruit (love) and sharing God’s love with all the persons of all generations who come into contact with us. As recipients of God’s generous love across the years, let us share God’s love with others.
A version of this article appears in the Thursday, July 2, 2009, edition of the NAC roundup/09 newsletter. To view the newsletter in its entirety, click here (1.24 MB). The document is in PDF format and requires Adobe Acrobat in order to read and/or print it. If you do not have Acrobat installed on your computer, you can download a free copy of Acrobat Reader here.