Embracing Lament: We’re not too old for what all of us need most: hope

A young person might expect life to get better when they’re older.

Someday the kids will be raised and out of the house.
I’ll retire and discover time for travel and friends and hobbies and service.
Gone will be the awful pressure to earn, perform, advance, compete.
I’ll have freedom to ignore problems I can’t solve and people I don’t like.

But for the older caregiver, life as a senior citizen may be the most challenging chapter of all. It would be one thing as a vigorous young adult to face the responsibilities waiting for the caregiver in the next room. But lifting, cleaning, and staying always alert wear on older caregivers in ways they never expected. And they don’t bounce back from a sleep-deprived night like they used to.

We older caregivers need help, and the wisest among us ask for it. We learn not to let pride keep us from finding helpers or substitute caregivers who will step in to carry part of the load.

And, of course, we go to God. Not as a last resort, but as a continuing resource. We think back on all the ways he’s helped us in the past, and his faithfulness encourages us to seek him again in the future.

This isn’t the first time we’ve faced trouble. With the psalmist, we’re deciding God will be with us in the problems we’re yet to encounter. He prays, “O God, from my youth you have taught me, and I still proclaim your wondrous deeds.”

“For you, O Lord, are my hope, my trust, O Lord, from my youth,” he tells God. “My praise is continually of you.” He doesn’t whitewash his current difficulty. Indeed, he spells it out in detail, laying all the hopelessness of it before God.

And then, after several sentences of woe, he returns to trust. “But I will hope continually and will praise you yet more and more.”

We might quote this verse to a young person and tell them it’s the secret to a satisfying life. But older folks need to believe it, too. More than those in any generation, in spite of our unexpected burdens, we should have hope. All our experience with God tells us he will win in the end.

Read: Psalm 71
Listen: “Prayer of Thomas Merton,” by Kate Campbell. 
Pray: Lord, “I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. . . . Therefore will I trust in you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone” —Thomas Merton.