Your Fight with Aging

I’ve been looking at past Dawns longingly for as many years as I can remember. Now I look at forty-year-old me and see how much firmer my legs were. When I was forty, I looked at thirty-year-old me and saw what seemed like a perfect body devoid of cancer scars and mastectomies. Younger, to me, was always better.

I have been telling myself so many ridiculous untruths for so long. I had to recognize this: if I am still looking at old pictures and thinking Wow, she was amazing, then it is reasonable to suspect that at 70 I will think the same about the woman I am today, and then at 80 about who I was at 70, and so on—unless I changed something.

It was time, I realized, for a full rewrite.

It takes time to unravel all the glorious gifts God has in store for us. You don’t get all the gifts God has for you in your youth. You get them over time. The work is the journey of life; the reward is the gifts God gives you along the way.

The victory is in living a full life each and every year. Living your life all out and being fully you, no matter the age. You in all your wondrous, quirky, beautiful glory. After all, God made only one of you. Why on earth wouldn’t you celebrate that?

As long as we keep believing a Hollywood story that says each year we become less, we are a part of the problem. The thought that a woman in her second half is any less than the woman she was the year before is a big ol’ stinky lie. And the longer we stay silent about it, the more women will believe it.

I’ve finally decided that shackles of lies are off; I will not look at my younger days with longing, and I will not wait five years only to look back at today with regret. I am fully here.

Lord, please clear out my mind of the lies I’ve believed about my second half of life. Show me how to live fully here, and celebrate these days.