Thanks for the Gift of Life, Mom and Dad
I pray that I have used it well
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Today I turned sixty. To put things in perspective, the current life expectancy in the United States as of this writing is just shy of seventy-nine years old. Curiously, for some reason, in Kansas, where I live, it is a few months shorter than average but I don’t plan on moving just to improve my odds of living longer. Additionally, my health dictates that I will likely lose a few years as well. Such is life. (No pun intended).
In our society, we seem to put a lot of stock into the events that occur with each passing decade. For some reason, I didn’t feel anything “special” when I turned 20, 30, 40, etc. Some people called me old, expected me to feel different, or something else, but I really didn’t. Today, however, isn’t the same.
What makes this birthday different?
When I look back at the six decades that I have been blessed with living, I thank two people more than any others. They are the wonderful and good-looking couple holding that cute little baby in the picture above. My mother and father got married in 1960 and stayed faithfully and loyally married until the Lord called Mom home at the young age of 62. The last time I saw her healthy and smiling; she was sixty.
This made me think about the significance of timing in a person’s life. I looked not only at my own life but at the lives of people of influence and realized that age is a very relative thing:
- I am twice the age of Jesus when He began His ministry.
- Noah was ten times as old as I am when he completed building the ark.
- The Apostles didn’t leave the area where Jesus walked and ministered for the first sixty years after His death.
Minds ripen at very different ages. Stevie Wonder
But why is it different for me? Why does our society make this decade a big deal?
If you think about it, most people are still working and perhaps even advancing in their careers up into their fifties. Their last promotion, raise, or transfer may come. In fact, it isn’t unheard of for people to be recruited to take on new jobs with pay raises and better positions at 50+. At fifty, you…
