I went to visit an old friend of ours last week who is now in a rest home and not able to get out much. I remembered how we had known him for over forty years, from the time when he was a vigorous man in his middle age, involved in his job and in various things in the local church. It is sad to see him as he is now, not able to look after himself, or even able to read for himself.

   I couldn’t help thinking of how we all like to think that things won’t change on one hand, and yet on the other hand we don’t think of how life IS going to change if we live long enough! We all want to live a long time, but no-one wants to get old!  We see other people getting older and becoming infirm, and yet we never stop to think what it must be like to be like that ourselves!

   But this is part of life. The Bible says that our life is like the flowers that start off in bud, then come into full flower, and finally get faded and then die down,  We have a graphic picture of this shown to us in Isaiah chapter 40, verses 6b-8  “all flesh is grass and all the goodness of it is as the flower of the field, The grass withers, the flowers fade because the Spirit of the Lord blows upon it. Surely people are like the grass which withers, and the flowers that fade but the Word of our God shall stand for ever”.

    In that last verse we have the whole point of life….God’s Word stands for ever! We can totally depend on what He says. Another friend of ours used to say, “God says it; I believe it, and that settles it!”

   When people like to argue with what we believe, we can hang onto that saying….their argument is not with us, but with what God says!

   Another older lady said  to me one day, “No-one told us when we were younger what it’s like to be old!”

I had to agree, and even if they had, we wouldn’t have taken any notice! We all tend to live in the present without giving a thought to the future, but we would all do well to think about what lies ahead and prepare our hearts and minds to meet whatever comes our way.