Dear senior citizen III

This is the conclusion of our discourse on the enviable status of being a senior citizen, and I want you to underscore the word “enviable”.

It means privilege or desirable.

Why do you think people go to great lengths to keep alive—living healthy, consulting physicians, treating diseases, exercising, driving carefully, and praying for good health? It is so that they will become senior citizens.  

That is why people celebrate their fiftieth, sixtieth, seventieth, eightieth birthdays and beyond.

Therefore, congratulations for being a senior!

Father figure

As our dialogue on senior citizenship has dovetailed nicely with the relatively silent whispers about Father’s Day, what a fine way to make a point of it!  

Mothers’ Day was celebrated from rooftops—that’s all right.  After all, our mothers carried us for nine months and bore the risks associated with pregnancy and childbirth.

Yet, for us fathers, we must not forget our role as head of family with full responsibility.

Fatherhood is a huge obligation that must be inculcated early in young males before they find themselves as fathers by default.

In their intimacies, they must be prepared for the seed that germinates later on.

The Lord Jesus taught us to pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven . . .”

Therefore, the father figure in every family is linked to God. 

To be a true father is to represent God in our relationship with our children and their mothers.

To shirk our responsibility as father is synonymous to being a weakling.

Body aging

As a senior, acknowledge that aging is inevitable.

Our body will show signs of weakness: knees wobbling, waist and back paining, hands shaking, belly sagging, eyes blurring, and body wrinkling.

But, isn’t that the natural order of things?

Every living organism, including giant oak and hard mahogany, eventually succumbs to old age and finally crumbles down.

So, senior, the body’s weakening behaviour is only responding to how God, who created the body, designed it to be.

Therefore, it is wise to accept the body’s natural behavior and help it to grow gracefully.  

Of course, you can dye your hair if you want, but allow the eyebrows, beard, and mustache to grey with poise to remind you of your senior citizenship status.  

As for senior women, we must excuse them because they have wigs, eye lashes, and facial make-up to remind us that they are different.

Other weakness

One senior man kept on bemoaning his inability to perform in bed and went about sorrowfully as if the world had come to an end.

Resorting to aphrodisiac lawyers is a fast way to bid planet earth goodbye, and seniors are wiser avoiding those lawyers. 

By the way, isn’t your wife also a senior citizen?

So what are you complaining about? 

It is true that Abraham was 100 years old and Sarah was 90 years old when they gave birth to Isaac, but the Scripture says “God enabled Abraham”—for the special purpose of having Isaac. 

If God has not enabled you, do not force issues.  

Unless you want to be like one senior man who forgot his wife in his old age and started chasing young girls.

This true story happened in Tamale to a man I knew.

When they found his mortal remains in a hotel room, the girl had already escaped!

“Therefore we do not lose heart,” says Apostle Paul.

“Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16).

Inwardly refers to our soul and spirit, and the reason they are renewed is that Christ dwells in us.

But if you are a senior citizen and Christ does not dwell in you, that is the most unfortunately thing in life.

No fears

By this time, the dread surrounding passing away should have been a thing of the past.

We should be used to it because we have witnessed it over and over again, given the number of funerals we have attended.

Yet, the dread still lingers on.

That fear is caused by Satan who makes us forget that passing away is not a dead end but a transition.

We are simply passing through this world like travellers or tourists on our way home.

Why should we fear going home?  

Cemeteries and cremation ashes do not hold souls; they are only the remains of flesh and bones.

That is why we refer to them as mortal remains.

The real “us” is the soul, and that would not be in the casket nor in the grave.

It would be gone.  

Gone where?  Gone where the soul belongs!

Where does the soul belong? 

The soul belongs to God who created it.

So, presumably, the soul returns to its Creator.

But there is a big problem—which is the subject of next week’s Weekend Talk.