Aging has a way of surprising us. Even though we know that our bodies were not made for mortality but for immortality, the slow faltering of bone and joint, memory and mobility, still catches us off guard. We wake one morning to a new ache, a new limitation, a new reminder that we are living far from the Garden we were meant to inhabit. And yet, even here, grace is quietly at work.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux once wrote: “Our Lord’s love shines out just as much through a little soul who yields completely to His Grace as it does through the greatest… Just as the sun shines equally on the cedar and the little flower, so the Divine Sun shines equally on everyone, great and small. Everything is ordered for their good, just as in nature the seasons are so ordered that the smallest daisy comes to bloom at its appointed time.”
There is deep comfort in that image: the Divine Sun shining equally on the towering cedar and the fragile daisy. On the strong and the failing. On the young and the aging. On the body that once ran freely and the body that now moves slowly, carefully, dependently. Nothing in us—no weakness, no decline—places us outside the radiance of God’s love.
And so we pray that the decline of our bodies not be wasted. That it might do its tutoring work, gently inclining our hearts toward the coming kingdom. For what we endure now—these frailties, these vexing diseases, these betrayals of muscle and marrow—is but our small share in the ache of a creation longing for restoration. Even our infirmities become invitations: to humility, to patience, to compassion, to a deeper reliance on mercy.
Where dependence increases, may we receive the hands of caregivers as grace rather than shame. May we trace in their tenderness the movement of God’s own hands, upholding us in weakness. And when our bodies betray our trust, may our hard-won experience soften us toward the sufferings of others.
Perhaps even a sense of humor becomes a kind of sacrament—an affectionate wink at our weaknesses, knowing that they are merely the evidences of a perishable body destined to rise imperishable. The greater joke, after all, is the one played upon death.
For in the dwindling of our strength, something else is quietly rising: hope. A memory of a song stirring in the bones. A martial melody whose drumbeat grows louder as the kingdom draws near. These infirmities are not the end of the story; they are the last buffetings before victory, the final notes before restoration.
So may the decline of our bodies incline our hearts and souls ever more vigorously toward God’s coming kingdom, ever more vigorously.
Smitten With Goodness 