Good morning…
I love the unifying murmuration of Holy Spirit power I feel with Betty Skinner as she nears 93 years old and with Kitty Crenshaw and Dr. Cathy Snapp, the authors of The Hidden Life Awakened, the captivating book chronicling Betty’s journey from deep clinical depression to the height of God’s healing to wholeness. Together we also connect closely with Dana Cunningham, who rewires our brains with piano and poetry at each inspiring Awake To Wellness Retreat. Betty lives in Ponte Vedra, Florida. Kitty lives in Jacksonville, Florida. Cathy lives in Tallahassee, Florida. Dana lives in the currently snow-drenched White Mountains of New Hampshire. And I live in Atlanta, Georgia. Yet, beyond all boundaries, we mysteriously flock together, regularly praying, emailing, and texting together, as God ages us into His pre-planned abundance.
Now I love sharing with you Betty’s soul-filling words posted last week by Kitty and Cathy on their website, The Hidden Life Awakened.
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Dear Ones,
If you stopped long enough to take a lingering gaze at me, you would probably surmise that under the snowcap of white hair and pruned face of wrinkles all is well. And all is well. There is within me a deep-rooted wellness that even the unrelenting demands of old age cannot touch. Yet in truth, I am very fragile. I can’t see very well, I can’t hear very well and I can’t walk very well. But, as I said, I am quite well within myself at 93.
What about old age? How do we attain to it and how do we attend to it? Attaining to it is inevitable. If we live long enough we will slowly live into it. Old age is the final season of our lives and it is the most difficult of all the seasons that have come before it. Though the preceding seasons offer us preparation indicative of our choices in the transformation process, still this final season with its diminishments, frailties and closures is brutal and long-suffering. Old age requires extraordinary and unfathomable courage. The pain, impairments…the humiliations of old age are so consuming and deeply afflicting that the cry for mercy becomes the silent but ever-present voice of the soul. It is a riveting, a passionate cry that connects with the Eternal and gives strength to stay the course. If we are to finish well, we must endure our own crucifixion through an unrivaled focus on the Crucified One. Such a privileged suffering is second only to martyrdom.
Our culture shivers at any hint of old age and has little respect for wisdom. It wraps itself in an ethereal blanket and lives an illusion that keeps youth embodied as eternal. Yet to deny old age is to deny an ever-deepening spiritual maturity nurtured in the humility of frailty, its constant companion. It is to deny the vine-ripened tenderness of aging, its mellowing that spills over into the richness of so sweet a love as to stifle us with its fragrance and Its Presence.
In this brief letter, I have endeavored to paint the suffering and imprint the vitality of focus. Darkness and light embrace one another and flow into wisdom, a testimony to the Truth that the darkness has not overcome the Light and that wisdom is a gathering of truths from the Light of each season, the possession of a disposition tempered by fire. Nothing disturbs it. All things are one. Divine Wisdom, the supreme gift of redemption as experienced in old age.
Now is the suffering season of my years
A never ending struggle without pause.
No clarity beneath this burning gaze of age
No drenching rain to fall and cool its blaze
Only the slowed down steps
The heavy load—the cross.
Spirit of Love, a suffering love
My passion.
And though the why of aging, its mysteries still elude me
I know I do not walk this season all alone.
Into the peace of promise I slowly drift
Detached from time, age, and humiliation
Immersed in cool, refreshing streams of grace
Parched lips reach up through sunlit waters
The sweetest of all praise—gratitude.
Spirit of Love, a suffering love
My passion.
BWS
Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. – 2 Corinthians 4:16
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So we’re not giving up. How could we! Even though on the outside it often looks like things are falling apart on us, on the inside, where God is making new life, not a day goes by without his unfolding grace. These hard times are small potatoes compared to the coming good times, the lavish celebration prepared for us. There’s far more here than meets the eye. The things we see now are here today, gone tomorrow. But the things we can’t see now will last forever (2 Corinthians 4:16-18, MSG).
…Sue…
