On Growing Older

I thought the other day-- less than three-and-a-half years and I'll be entering the ninth decade of life. That's a pessimistic way of looking at 80. Growing older one can expect a number of things to happen.. and many of them are actually good. Well, some of them. What are they? I'm thinking.
Friends. Old people have their own humor. Really funny, too. You wouldn't always understand. Instant rapport with new ones sometimes- but always "old" old friends understand best. Trouble is so many of them now live in heaven. (I hope.)
Family "Family" is a big thing to me. But over the generations a family is like one of those computer-generated kalaidascope-like patterns that keep churning out unexpected loops and whorls and new turns and beauty.
When you stop to look at your place in the pattern it is easy to be overwhelmed and lose your place.
I knew my grandfather Purchis, and went fishing with him once; he gave me a shotgun when I turned 14. But I only saw him twice after I was married, and although I "loved" him he was really a stranger to me, what with the separation of miles and years. I didn't know my grandfather Metcalfe at all.
For me family love never stops, but patterns emerge and develop and old people have a place that touches the spinning circles, now intimately, then more and more remotely. We only have ONE father and ONE mother, but TWO sets of grandparents, and FOUR sets (that's 8!) great-grandparents so we never can have everyone "home" for Christmas! More's the pity!

Faith. Ask my son Mark about "pencil" "ink" and "blood." I really am into "blood." Sort of like things that are 'important to our group,' and things that are 'important beyond our group', and things that are IMPORTANT!

Funny how I still live a lot by "pencil" I suppose but I don't judge you by my rules.

It has been dawning on me that God actually loves (even) me! I can't explain a lot of things I used to "know." But I really do believe what I believe, however.

I believe in God's call to holiness. One definition of 'holiness' is simply belonging to God. Even I can do that! Belong, I mean! (See Romans 12: 1,2)