Finding Grace in Old Age

The challenges of old age can put me in a downward spiral sometimes. But lately I think my beginnings of dementia are showing a positive side. In volunteer work at my local Help Center to aid my granddaughter Hadley to get used to working with people she doesn’t know, I get pretty tired after standing for a couple of hours. But I recover more quickly than I used to, because I both enjoy the people we work with and it’s a good feeling at the end of the day to have helped not just my granddaughter, but other people too. Hadley has Autism so she is very good at detail, while I never was and am definitely not getting better since my brain leaks. We work well as a team now that she’s learned to remind me gently and kindly when I am forgetting. She loves to shop for hours, though often she doesn’t buy anything. I usually take a book to read with coffee somewhere. Today after I took her to see her cats and her dad a half hour away from my apartment, she ended up shopping for over an hour with me drinking coffee sans book. After a while I started focusing on the people coming and going. Soon, this led to praying for each of them. It kind of connected me to them and I actually began to care about them in a way. Some people were obviously from Arab countries, others looked and sounded like they came from Slavic countries, some were white and others black. It touched me particularly when two young men who weren’t together came in and sat near one another.  One was wearing an earring and had a hat with a rainbow on it and the other had a sweatshirt from a Christian college that I get emails from.   The emails have very enthusiastic reflections about Jesus and prayer, but are very politically conservative. Watching these two young men who are probably very different in many ways, because of my own experiences of the Love of God expressed in Jesus and also having two gays sons and a trans grandchild that I love very much, it gave me a feeling of an affectionate connection to both of them. I don’t know if my prayers for or my kind feelings toward the very varied and different people I saw there made much difference for them, but it transformed my day and somehow healed some of the fear and pain that today’s world has put in my heart.  Sometimes I really do feel that if I am open to the world in the new ways in the amount of time that being 86 gives me, these may be the best years yet.