I Am Sixty Eight And Starting

Nobody in your life has said the word late to you.

Not once. Your daughter is pleased. The woman across the road thinks it is wonderful. Nobody at church has raised an eyebrow.

You say it to yourself, though. You said it this morning, standing in the hardware store with a small thing in your hand, and it went: what are you doing, at your age, starting this now.

That voice does not come from anybody currently alive in your life. It came in a long time ago, from a world that had firm opinions about when a person was finished, and it stayed after that world went.

Here is what I want to establish before we go a step further. Not having been taught something is not a character flaw at nineteen and it is not one at sixty eight. The gap is the same gap. Only the voice around it got louder, and the voice is not telling the truth.

They shall still bring forth fruit in old age

There is a psalm that ends with a promise about age that I do not think gets read out loud nearly enough.

They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing. (Psalm 92:14, King James Version)

The word to sit with is still. Still bringing forth. Not: brought forth, back when they were of use. Not: remembered fondly for what they once did. Still, present tense, ongoing, now.

And the image before it, in that psalm, is a tree planted in the house of the Lord. Trees do not have a productive window with an end on it. An old tree carries more than a young one, and everybody who has ever kept an orchard knows it.

You have a promise about age that speaks in the present tense, and sixty eight has never once been the far side of anything God is doing. Psalm 92:14 says still bringing forth fruit rather than remembering fruit, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that land as a plain fact rather than as a kind thing said to an older person.

And notice the second half, because it is almost comic in its refusal to be gentle about it. Fat and flourishing. That is not a polite word for managing well. That is abundance, said about people the world had written off.

You are described in Scripture as flourishing rather than as winding down, and years counted has never once been the measure God uses. The Spirit of God is the one who overturns a sentence a person has been saying about themselves, and it is written in Psalm 92 that the fruit in old age is still coming.

Where the voice came from

Here is what I want you to understand about the word late, because it is not yours and you did not make it.

That sentence was grown in a world where things had ages attached. There was an age for learning, an age for working, an age for stopping, and a person who stepped outside their allotted stretch was thought to be slightly ridiculous. Nobody argued with it because nobody had to. It was simply the water.

That world has gone. The sentence stayed. And it is now running in a woman whose actual life has room in it that her grandmother never had.

You have been carrying a rule from a world that no longer exists, and an inherited sentence has never once been the same as the truth about the life in front of you. It is written in Psalm 92:14 that the bringing forth is still happening in old age, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can retire a voice that has outlived the century it came from.

There is something else worth naming. Starting at sixty eight is harder in one specific way, and it is not the hands and it is not the mind. It is that nobody is expecting it of you, so there is no push. Nobody is going to make you. Every single bit of it has to come from you, and that is genuinely more difficult than being sixteen and required to.

That is a real difficulty and it deserves saying out loud. It is not a reason to stop.

Now the limit, and I say it here rather than in a footer. Never a gas appliance, never the breaker panel, never mains wiring, never a wall holding the building up, never a roof, and never a ladder past a step stool, and I mean that last one for everybody and not only for you. Call a licensed professional and pay them properly.

You are entirely right to stop where the danger starts, and choosing a small safe job has never once been a smaller kind of courage than choosing a large one. The Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person peace about a boundary, and Scripture puts the flourishing on the tree that is still standing rather than on the one that took the most risk.

The first one, and the date

So here is the ask, and it has a second half that matters as much as the first.

Do the first small job tonight. And then write the date on the back of an envelope and keep it.

The job first. Something genuinely small. A handle, a hinge, a bulb, a drawer. Something at table height that needs no ladder and no shopping.

You are able to do one small thing tonight at sixty eight, and an age has never once been able to reach into a pair of hands and take a screwdriver out of them. The Spirit of God is the one who makes an ordinary evening into a beginning, and Psalm 92:14 puts the bringing forth of fruit squarely in old age and not before it.

Then the date. This is the part people skip and it is the part that works.

Write it down. The day, and one line about what you did. Because the voice that says late is going to come back next week, and the only thing that has ever silenced it is evidence, and evidence has to be written or it evaporates.

In four months that envelope will have eleven lines on it, and eleven lines is not a woman who started too late. Eleven lines is an orchard.

You have permission to keep a record of your own beginning, and one line on an envelope has never once been a vain thing in the eyes of God. It is written in Psalm 92 that they shall still bring forth fruit and be flourishing, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room with you.