When Age is Just A Number

Reading from a book about Grace, from Naomi

Yesterday evening Rebekah and I hosted a small birthday party for my mum, Grace Maul. She turned 80--years-old this week, which is a remarkable achievement.
I love the balance of life that family brings. Our daughter, Naomi, is expecting our first grandchild in just three short weeks, and meanwhile my mum turns 80. Yet you can see from the pictures that my niece Hannah's children, Haley and Hudson, are right there on their great-grandmother's wavelength. It doesn't seem that there's any generation gap at all.

And to think that Haley is still three years younger than my mum was when World War Two started, and when the British government evacuated her from her East London home (she came back after a year). Talk about a lot of water under the bridge since the day she was born in 1931.
Yet there they were, Hudson and Grace and Haley, playing together and chatting happily and perfectly in synch.

Haley crowing her great-grandmother as the birthday queen!

It's because the spirit is immortal, that's what I think. Hmm, I didn't know that was where I'd be going when I opened this post a couple of minutes ago.

But, the more I think about it the more important a point I believe I'm making. The reason my mum is such a "live wire" who is still very much relevant - and never could be otherwise - in 2011 (she was the featured speaker at the women's meeting at her church Thursday - on her actual birthday) is that Grace Maul is still the same person - at the core of herself - as almost-8-year-old Grace Kemp was back when England declared war on Hitler's Germany, September 1, 1939, just a few day's before her birthday.

I think we lose touch sometimes with our essential selves; and we allow our image of who we are to be so caught up with the stress of life, or politics, or work, or our worries, or image, or finances, or discord, or difficult relationships, or the news, or peer pressure, or cultural trends, or fads, or consumerism, or a million other misdirections ... that we become ungrounded, misdirected people:

• "old" people...
• "hackneyed" people...
• "the right kind of" people...
• "worn" people...
• "cool" people...
• "fake" people...
• "conservative" people...
• "liberal" people...
• "successful" people...
• "stereotyped" people...
• We're unrecognizable, or cynical, or self-absorbed or just plain lost.

They speak a common language...

But then we spend time with someone like my mum, Grace Kemp Maul ("Grace Ellen Watts Maul" in British), and we are reminded that the best place to meet one another is as immortal spirits. That's why my mum has friends who are 80, 90, 60, 40, 25, 15, 10, 5 and 4 (and in-between). That's why the young women at her church like to hear her speak just as well as her peers by age.

Because age is just a number if you understand and live into the truth that your spirit is immortal.

That's worth thinking about, isn't it?
- DEREK