Recently, I enjoyed reconnecting with a friend from college who is now sixty-something years old (like me) and who cares for her elderly mom (like me). There are a lot of us! This friend described how she and her husband took her mother, a widow in declining health, into their home; they had thought the time would be short, but the years of care are stretching long. “We had all sorts of plans laid for our retirement years — travel and ministry and so forth,” said my friend, rather ruefully. “We just didn’t anticipate this.”
My friend loves her mom, but she is struggling with the weight of caring for her in her old age. The huge commitment of time, space, money, and emotional support somewhat ambushed her. It’s a story told often these days, in various versions, but with the same theme of figuring out how best to care for aging parents.
And the numbers of these mothers and fathers will only grow as baby boomers crowd the ranks of the elderly. From the world’s perspective, solutions to the problem can be found in improved government programs, retirement facilities, and healthcare provisions. Certainly, some of these solutions can help. From a Christian perspective, however, we believers have not a problem but an opportunity — an opportunity to live out God’s call to honor our parents.
What can we tell adult children in the church to help prepare them for this call to honor aging parents and elders? As one in the thick of learning the lessons (and the blessings) of honoring, I would suggest three main messages for the adult children among us.
1. Look Ahead
The media is full of lies about the future. We adults can forget too easily that this vitamin supplement will not keep us (or our parents) forever young, and that investment will not give us (or our parents) unending security. Advertisements do not show the later stages of old age and death.
To see the whole story, we need to visit retirement communities or nursing homes — or hopefully churches! We as God’s people should be taking great pains to include, spend time with, and listen to the elderly in our church families. We need to know them — to the end. Younger generations need to witness firsthand what it looks like to obey God’s strong call to honor our parents and to respect the elders among us. (See, for example, Exodus 20:12; Leviticus 19:2–3, 32; Deuteronomy 32:6–7; and Proverbs 23:22; 30:17.)
God made us humans to live in generations, with one generation telling the next about the glory of God and the wonder of our salvation in Jesus Christ (Psalm 78:4). As we teach the Scriptures generation by generation in the church, we help younger people look ahead with open eyes. We must tell the whole story.
After the fall, God’s judgment of sin made the generational flow full of sorrow — including the sorrowful decay of bodies leading to physical death. Aging and death are not avoidable threats to our happiness; they are the wages of sin. They are not good and natural parts of Mother Nature’s flow; they are grievous judgments from the hand of a holy God.
Most importantly, we teach the next generations to look ahead to the real hope of the gospel. God’s own Son came to conquer not just physical death but also the greater spiritual death that is eternal separation from our Creator. Jesus Christ took our sin to the cross and fully suffered God’s punishment of death in our place. Through faith in him, we can look ahead — and teach the next generations to look ahead — to resurrected bodies like Christ’s, to eternal life in the new heaven and earth where God will dwell with us, his people.
So, look ahead. Include aging and death (both your parents’ and yours) in your plans. Listen to the Bible’s whole story, and look ahead with hope.
2. Arm Yourself
All of us easily inflatable humans like to imagine ourselves swooping into a crisis, acting heroically, and saving those who would have been lost without us. Caring for elderly parents is not like that — not usually, anyway.
Adult children need to hear the call not to quick public heroism but rather to long messy battles unseen and unsung. The enemy of death has been defeated at the cross and the empty tomb, yet until the victorious Savior returns, this dark foe is still hanging around, spreading pain and grief. Our risen Lord empowers us to face this enemy through faith that perseveres.
So, how shall we advise adult children to arm themselves for hours of patiently sitting with an elderly loved one, for daily conversations with an aging mother who doesn’t hear well, for respectful care for a father struggling with dementia — for adjustment after adjustment to their own schedules and retirement plans?
Certainly, there is wisdom in listening to and learning from doctors and experienced caregivers. But Christians have the full resources of the all-wise God available to them — by God’s Spirit, through his word, and among his people. Generational ministry lives in the church, Christ’s body; we are meant to work together as we honor the previous generation and pass God’s truth to the next.
Regular participation in corporate worship centered on the preaching of God’s word is the basic layer of my armor for the battle as I care for my 98-year-old mom. My weekly church Bible study helps to arm me for hours spent with her and on her behalf. Brothers’ and sisters’ prayers (and sometimes brothers and sisters themselves) go with me, and the Scriptures feed my soul — and give me the best food to share with Mom. The ordinary means of grace are meant to fortify us regularly for all of life — not just the grand hours, but all the little moments of faithful service offered in the name of the Savior who laid down his life for us.
So, arm yourself. Start early; don’t be ambushed. The battle might well be long and hard, but what’s at stake will shine gloriously in the end.
3. Get Down
This is not martyrdom, this call to care for the elderly. It is God’s command, and we get to please him by obeying. Making some return to our parents, according to 1 Timothy 5:4, is “pleasing in the sight of God.”
We grown humans tend to forget that we were once babies, naked and often dirty, needy and inconvenient. Why would we forgo making some return to those whose lives were often turned upside down as they cared for us? And why would we neglect the lessons to be learned about the care of our heavenly Father, whose own Son emptied himself and came down for the sake of us sinful children?
We won’t care for aging parents perfectly. Part of humbly accepting the call is acknowledging our need for God’s merciful forgiveness and overflowing grace. We will not solve all the complexities and meet all the needs of old age. But we can point our loved ones to the One who promises to carry his people all the way from the womb to old age and gray hairs (Isaiah 46:3–4).
In the presence of the elderly, we are often standing right beside the doorway to eternity. These moments of care may look lowly and humdrum from the outside, but they are actually earth-shattering. Souls are entering the very presence of God. We caregivers get to be confronted with our own life’s brevity; we get to learn to pray, “Teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12).
None of us is above caring for aging loved ones. So, look ahead to this part of the story, arm yourself to walk through it faithfully, and get down low to be blessed by the Father above.
