Do you want to learn the secrets to staying young at heart? With over seven decades of experience, Mark Rutland shares several factors that are vital to maintaining a rejuvenated spirit: laughter, generosity, forgiveness, and gratitude. Whether you’re on your way to the doctor’s office or the diner down the street, you can restore the spring in your step and the happiness in your heart.
Charisma House
Day 1
Scriptures: Proverbs 15:15, Psalms 126:2, Job 8:21
Keep On Laughing
Shakespeare wrote that life “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Shakespeare had it wrong. Life is not so much told by an idiot as it is all about idiots, and I am not the least of them. Idiots, not all of whom are in Washington, lack the creativity to make up such a tale as a life is, any life, including mine. The randomness, the wild lurches to port and back to starboard in the midst of heavy seas, the deserts, and the deluges back-to-back and back again make me know that God is real. He must be. God is not the Divine Idiot writing our lives as some meaningless yarn full of sound and fury and utterly lacking significance. He does not dictate every detail. We, all of us humans, have added plenty of both sound and fury into our own lives and into the lives of others. What a comedy!
Here is the point.
Only God could take the whole mad, random mess and weave it all together into a lovely quilt.
In my life, for example, though I am not sure of what it is an example, there has been plenty of sound and fury, far too much of both. Of sadness, my own and the sadnesses I have caused, there has been no lack. I have made no secret of my battle, especially in my earlier years, with dark depression. The thing that kept me sane, at least as sane as I have been, is that I never took myself very seriously. I could always, well, usually, see what was funny about it all and about me in particular.
Despite the moments of pain and the seasons of grief, both of which I have experienced, I have also had more than my share of laughter.
Proverbs 17:22 says, “A merry heart does good like a medicine” (MEV).
I determined early on to take my medicine like a big boy. A merry heart may come more naturally to some than others. Circumstances may make for more or less merriment, to be sure, but the bottom line is we can choose to be merry. If there is one thing that can make our senior years better and healthier, it is the sweet, sweet medicine of laughter. My advice to seniors is simple: Laugh lots.
Day 2
Scriptures: 2 Corinthians 9:7, Luke 6:38, Proverbs 3:27
Keep On Giving
I once witnessed a sad scene in a breakfast restaurant.
A family of four—father, mother, a teenage boy, and a little girl—sat at a table near me. The two adults and the boy ordered large glasses of orange juice, but when the youngest, the daughter, chimed in, her father would not allow it. She pleaded her case but to no avail, and I saw genuine hurt in her eyes. What should have been a fun Saturday breakfast out as a family became an unhappy memory for one of them.
The saddest part is that it was over something completely unimportant. Perhaps the father thought he was teaching his youngest a lesson about frugality. Perhaps he was hoping to teach her the value of a dollar. When I looked into her moist little eyes, I thought he had sadly miscommunicated. He thought he was saying something about waste. You’ll never finish a large glass. Waste not, want not. She heard something about rejection. You’re not worth a large glass.
Frugality is a value worth teaching, but so is gracious generosity.
The few cents saved that day were not worth a single one of those little tears. There is a time for financial restraint, for counting the cost, and for practicing some good Puritan frugality. The price of a car, for instance. The size of your house payment. Those are just such times. There is also a time to go ahead and splurge. Lose all control! Go totally crazy! Know when it’s time to let a little girl order that large juice. Frugality and stingy living are not the same.
“To everything, there is a season…” is the wisdom of Scripture (Eccles. 3:1). There is a time to close your wallet and a time to open it even wider. If gray hair bespeaks wisdom, and it is supposed to, we seniors, better than the young, should know which season is which.
I ached to go to that family’s table and whisper in the young father’s ear, “Buy her the large juice. She will be happy, and you’ll be glad you did. I am old, and I can tell you this is a moment to lighten up and loosen up. Tighten down another time. Not at breakfast on a Saturday.”
It is a predictable and not uncommon phenomenon that many who live generous lives grow less so as they age.
Beyond financial generosity, some who have lived and walked for many years in openhearted, openhanded faith begin to tighten their grip with age. The challenge for us in our senior years is that massive, crashing waves of fear begin to erode the shoreline of our faith. Frightening questions assail us. Questions we thought we would never have to face. What is the burn rate for my life savings? Will I have enough at the end of my life? How can I keep from being a burden to my kids? What if I have huge end-of-life medical expenses? How will I pay for those? Will I be able to leave any estate to my heirs?
In response to those questions, we tend to tighten down. That’s not all bad, of course. If we are smart, we will clamp down a bit on our spending, which is a good thing, a very good thing. What goes wrong for so many seniors is that fear steals their spirit of generosity and leaves in its place the spirit of miserliness.
Giving leads to giving and withholding to withholding.
The man, at any age, who gives freely to his church is also likely to give to other causes. The man who habitually withholds his money from charitable giving is also likely to withhold his compliments and his praise and his love. Ebenezer Scrooge did not suddenly become a parsimonious wretch on his seventieth birthday. He inched his way into meanness.
The young at heart are practitioners of grace, and grace is generosity of life. More often than not, we can give less financially as we age and retire. That’s the great thing about tithing. It has nothing to do with amount. A tithe on a million dollars of income and a tithe on a social security check are the same.
A tithe is a tithe.
Day 3
Scriptures: Ephesians 4:32, Mark 11:25, Proverbs 19:11
Keep On Forgiving
One of my favorite stories is that of a man who was a deer hunter, an inveterate deer hunter.
He never missed an opening day, and every year, he begged his wife to go with him. Hunting, he said, was something they could do together. He offered to get her a rifle and teach her everything, but every year, she declined, shocked that he would even suggest such a thing.
Finally, she decided he was right. Furthermore, she decided to surprise him. She secretly bought a beautiful Savage Arms 110 bolt-action rifle and enough ammunition for a small militia. At the salesman’s recommendation, she also took shooting lessons, at which she discovered, to her shock, that she was a natural shot. She and her instructor were amazed at her incredible accuracy. She proudly took the rifle home to surprise her hunter husband.
He was surprised, to say the least, and genuinely overjoyed. He had dreamed of this. Likewise, he was delighted with her choice of rifles, but, of course, he wanted to know if she knew how to use the expensive weapon.
“Just let me demonstrate,” she responded triumphantly, at which they went into a field near their home. When she began to shoot the walnuts off the trees, all doubt was removed from the husband’s mind. This was great. This was an answer to his prayers. At last, he had a wife who wanted to go hunting with him and who could shoot like Annie Oakley.
On the opening day of deer season, he took her to a likely stretch of woods where he had hunted in the past. Leaving her in a deer stand, he explained that he would circle around the hills ahead and see if one would run toward her.
“If I hear you shoot,” he assured her, “I will come back immediately.”
He had hardly gotten out of sight, however, when he heard the report of her rifle. Jogging back to the stand where he’d left her, he found her holding the rifle on a terrified man, hands raised, backed up to a pine tree, and shivering in his boots.
“What in the world is going on here?” demanded the shocked husband.
“I have killed this deer,” she explained, “and this man is trying to drag him off.”
“No, lady,” said the frightened man. “You can have the deer. Just let me get my saddle off of him.”
The kind of legalistic reductionism which hopes to make life work by memorizing laws can backfire.
One can learn all the “rules” for successful living and wind up skillfully killing the wrong animal. “Just tell me the rules” may work in physics, but it does not work in relationships. People are not machines.
Treat your spouse like a ballistic galvanometer, whatever that is, and find out. Of all relationships, marriage is the least mechanical. Of all seasons in marriage, the senior years are the most emotionally complex and sensitive. Some of the glue that held it together in the early years may have lost its adhesiveness.
Just as our bodies tend to get more brittle and less resilient, our emotions can lose their elasticity.
Anger can be closer to the surface. Old, unresolved hurts now leave sensitive places with raw nerve endings that others can touch unintentionally. Those painful jolts of electricity may have always been there, but as we age, they become harder to hide. Harder, or perhaps we just do not try as hard to hide them. Perhaps, we figure, that hurt. It hurt a lot, and I’m old, and I deserve to show it hurt. In fact, I deserve to hurt somebody back.
I need to live in the flow of forgiveness, or like the lady deer hunter, I may confuse the bank officer with the crazy computerized world that seems determined to expose my every insecurity. What helps?
The only thing that helps is to keep on bathing in an unceasing stream of forgiveness.
If I can live and walk in forgiveness, if forgiveness flows up inside me like a spring, it will flow out of me and over those frightening people and things around me.
Forgiveness, like love, is not all about feeling. It is a life decision.
I can decide to be a forgiving person, and because that decision is mine, it means I am in control. I am not the defeated, frightened elderly victim of this crazy new world and the teenagers who run it. I decided. I am in control because nothing and no one can make me not forgive it, him, her, the bank, the waitress, whatever.
Day 4
Scriptures: 1 Thessalonians 5:18, Psalms 118:24, Colossians 3:17
Keep On Being Grateful
Gratitude is appealing at any age, but in our senior years, it may be our last best hope of being attractive.
But it takes humility. It’s OK not to know everything. Seniors who let young people explain things to them are attractive. It’s OK for us not to know who the hot bands are this hour. Let your grandchildren tell you how great they are as you nurse an inward, smug knowledge that whatever band they are talking about is nothing, worse than nothing, compared to Danny and the Juniors or The Crickets or Gladys Knight and the Pips, or, well, we could name them all night.
We know whichever band or solo artist they are talking about is not worthy to tie Elvis’ shoes. Whichever talentless and plastic contemporary “country” singer, so-called, that they gush about should not be mentioned in the same sentence with Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. We know that. Indeed, God knows that. But we need not point it out to them. We need to listen, pretend interest, and be grateful for the conversation.
When your son, not even out of his forties—and what could he possibly know about sports at that tender age anyway—wants to tell you all about how great this week’s superstar is, try a little humility. Just listen while deep within, you know, and the angels agree that Larry Byrd, Willie Mays, Rocket Rod Laver, and Sugar Ray Robinson would defeat them, crush them, actually, whoever they are. All that may be true, but you don’t need to say it aloud. Let them talk about this week’s heroes and villains.
Humility listens. Humility is grateful they want to be with you and talk to you at all.
When you cannot make some piece of equipment work—some technological horror that you should not have to deal with and that promised to make your life easier and has not—humble yourself. Accept the help. Be grateful. Laugh at yourself. Then, when you are all alone, rant about stupid technology that has made our stupid world stupider, and that should not have been foisted off on you in the first place because it is stupid, stupid, stupid. Go on and vent. Rant! You will feel better after the steam is released. Just remember to do it when you’re alone. No one wants to hear it. Not even your spouse. Your spouse has asked God to let you know this, and I am His instrument.
When you eat Thanksgiving dinner at your daughter’s house, and she does not do it the way you always did it, which was, of course, the correct way, be grateful you are there at all. What? I can hear you object: She should be grateful for me. I raised her. Taught her to cook. I gave her life. She, not I, should be the grateful one, and this is not the dressing I taught her to make. She says it is not dressing at all. She has decided to make Kachchi Biryani instead of dressing. She got the recipe from a Bangladeshi cookbook a friend gave her. A friend? Not her mother? Not the recipe her mother gave her? Kachchi Biryani? It tastes like it. Do they celebrate Thanksgiving in Bangladesh? I don’t think so.
Of course, you are right.
On the other hand, would you rather be right or welcome at Thanksgiving?
Praise the turkey. Compliment the cook. Eat the Biryani with as much gusto as possible. Be outspoken, even over-the-top, in your approbation. Then, stop at Cracker Barrel on the way home. It will be filled with seniors avoiding each other’s eyes. They will know. You will all know. Eat some dressing and giblet gravy, and thank God you have money enough to pay for it and still buy an Anne Murray Christmas CD on the way out. When you get home, have hot chocolate and enjoy Anne Murray and be ever so happy you don’t have to listen to Taylor Swift.
We begin life crying when things are not as we want them to be.
That is not a good way to end life. Babies cry when they are wet or hungry or lonely and just want to be held. They cry a lot to express their unhappy condition. They sense intuitively that if they cry long enough, loudly enough, someone will come and fix it, whatever it is. They are so cute and cuddly, however, that no one holds it against them. Crying and wet and unhappy, a baby is still a cute little thing you just want to hold and hug and kiss on.
Old people? Not so much. We can die mean and angry and filled with self-pity, but if we die that way, we die old. Our best hope is to keep on giving and forgiving and being sweet and humble and grateful. Right to the end of this thing. We can keep on keeping on right up to the very moment when we die young…as old as possible.