And We Truly Are Kids

Just yesterday, I had the privilege to talk to couples very much older than myself. They were asking about my life and they were asking about Ben’s life. After a little while, I told them this, “It’s good to be around Ben, because we are just babies with all this relationship stuff. So, it’s good to learn the push and pull of it all.” They nodded their heads in full agreement. Perhaps, analyzing our age and comparing their weathered love story to our very bright red, blooming one.

I respect those faces aged with knowledge and those hearts shaped in wisdom. I am not ignorant to the fact that I am just a girl, a very young woman, who is living a life that hasn’t even touched a fraction of the stories they have lived and known. I would welcome their advice and I would ask for it unashamed! I can easily delete from my mind all those well-meaning blog posts written by women who are hardly older than myself .But if  I could sit down with an older generation and pepper them with questions about life for hours, I would. Perhaps, I will.

Why don’t we?

That beautiful thing called old age is rare, and those beautiful couples wrinkled from life are more valuable than we treat them. We credit far too many blog posts as places to glean wisdom and knowledge about relationships and dating and love and life.

A compiled blog site, I am positive, can hold much knowledge and good practical advice. But a life? A wrinkled life? A lived life? A life of 60+ years? We discard that easily when we pass by the elderly as we refuse even curiosity to ask them about their life and what they have learned by living in it.

I can easily type into a search bar, “How to love him well.” But I am convinced that none of the advice that is plastered across the internet could even come close to the wisdom of an elderly person who has trusted God for a lifetime of blessings, lessons, mistakes, and forgiveness.

And Ben and I? We are just kids. Those little young-ins, growing up, and living life together for the first time. Nineteen and Twenty-two. Little ages. Young hearts. Asking for knowledge. Applying wisdom. Seeking the elderly hearts.

After we talked with the older couples, I was feeling refreshed. I was feeling privileged. To have talked to so much life, so much age, so much wisdom had left me thinking and reflecting. We bowed our heads and together, we prayed. She began,  “We pray for these two, and they truly are kids to us.” The statement couldn’t even offend me. It didn’t even come close. We are young. And we need more prayer every day that we are alive. We need all the wisdom and all the encouragement of those older than us.

We need the elderly.

So for those young people who are learning to love each other, remember the elderly. Remember that they have wisdom as they have lived a lifetime for God. Ask them questions. Accept your youth. Enjoy your youth, but do not discard the wisdom of those who have gone before you.

Ben and I need the elderly.

And I am convinced that you do too.