Dean:          David, what subject would you and Karen like to start us out with as we begin this new year of 2024?

David:         Viewing old age is a gift. A gift not all that many are given. And that’s because the two of us now know for sure that we fit into the old age category.

Karen:         You actually had some doubts about that?

Intro:            Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.

David:         Karen, I am prepared to pepper you with questions. Let’s begin with, do you think of yourself as old?

Karen:         I do, David. I actually am enjoying this age. I’d like to say to people, “Don’t be afraid of getting old because there are just a lot of gifts in these later years that I don’t think we’re told much about or we don’t know how to anticipate them.” So, I’d like to talk about that more.

David:         Here’s a guy who was really, really, really old in Scripture. Do you know who I’m talking about?

Karen:         Well, I’m guessing Methuselah. Was it Methuselah?

David:         Yes, of course. He’s the oldest. Being raised in a Christian home you get these trick questions early on. Who’s the oldest man in the Bible? 969 years old. I don’t try to figure that out.

Karen:         Oh, my goodness! I didn’t realize it was that much. Wow. He really was the oldest.

David:         Yeah, he was. These are questions you probably won’t know the answer to, but I’ll ask them anyway. I read this, so I would sound very intelligent. Methuselah’s father.

Karen:         I’m getting Enoch.

David:         Enoch was the saint who walked with God, and he was not for God took him, so apparently, he didn’t die like normal people died. He just went into the presence of the Lord.

Karen:         Oh, that’s lovely. Is that the Scripture? Enoch walked with God.

David:         It’s in Genesis.

Karen:         Oh, beautiful. I wish we could all have that.

David:         That would be neat, wouldn’t it?

Karen:         Yeah, a commendation like that.

David:         Elijah went up to heaven in a chariot of fiery horses. I think I’d prefer the Elijah. Okay, I’ve got the father’s name of Methuselah. That’s Enoch. Now, Methuselah has a son. We’ll skip him and then he has a grandson.

Karen:         Okay.

David:         Who’s that?

Karen:         I want to be a pure guesswork.

David:         This is wild because it’s Noah.

Karen:         Oh, my goodness, it’s Noah.

David:         Yeah, in fact, these are way back the early chapters of Genesis.

Karen:         Okay.

David:         Yeah, that’s all kind of fascinating. Okay. Methuselah just one last little thing. He died the same year as the flood, according to the Genesis account. We don’t know whether he died in the flood or died before the flood, but it’s just kind of trivial. Okay. Some cultures honor gray hair. Some don’t. What about the Jewish culture back in Bible times?

Karen:         Oh, I think the elders were revered. You know, David, we know how what the age expectancy is for modern people. It’s in the 70s, something like that. Well, but that wasn’t the case in those days. The older generation died off earlier.

David:         Earlier.

Karen:         So, to have elders, they were really revered and respected and people appreciated for them for what they did have to give.

David:         What about other cultures we visited? The Lord’s been good to us. We’ve been in many, many countries. What would you say?

Karen:         Well, do you remember being in Africa and Kenya not too long ago and you were white haired and I’m white haired? People were so lovely to us than the citizens of Kenya, I think it was. And someone said to me then, you know, “This culture reveres old age, white haired people.” And again, the same difficulty is that very often the elders died before they reach old age.

So, we did feel that there. And I think that’s again the reason why there is a respect. We have an American culture which is youth oriented. And I think we really do have a lot of ageism in our culture, and we absorb that ageism. There isn’t the reverence for the old ones. They, you know, move to retirement centers or they’re not visited, or they don’t have the power in our culture that they do in some others.

David:         I would say that’s very true. And when I was younger, I didn’t have the interest or the reverence for age as I should have.

Karen:         Well, and I don’t think we’re taught that although I had that more in my family, in the Burton family, because there was a whole clan of Burton’s who were older.

David:         More so in your family than in my family.

Karen:         Yeah, very. And they were wonderful people. I mean, in some ways the way I feel about age probably has a lot to do with those people because they were filled with laughter and love. They loved the Lord. They loved one another. So, there was a great model for me as a young woman.

David:         How much do you think about aging, Karen? Is it on your mind all the time?

Karen:         It’s there, but it’s not worrying about aging. It’s just I’m accepting the fact that I am in my last decades when I’m grateful to be as well as I am and active as I am and have a lot of interest areas that stimulate me. How about you? Do you think about aging very much?

David:         I’m aware of it, but I wouldn’t say I think about it a lot.

Karen:         It’s not a worrisome thought. It’s the same presence you have when you’re in your 50s or 60s. I mean, maybe a little bit more. So, you think about it a little bit more.

David:         I see people and they will refer to their age and then I’ll think sometimes I am really old. He’s talking to me in his 60s. I’m middle-aged. So, in your mind, what would be a good age to live to? And what would be an age where you would say, “I sure hope I’m still not around when I get to that age?”

Karen:         I don’t think it’s age specific. I think it’s, am I still functional? Am I still able to contribute? None of us want to be a burden on the ones we love. And there are some people who are disabled who still are a blessing to the people around them and you hear this a lot.

So, they have wonderful attitudes and there’s the love that they’re able to convey. So, it’s not so much that I just don’t want to become dysfunctional. That’s when life for me needs to end when I am nothing but a burden to someone. So, I think everyone feels that way who’s in the aging process.

David:         You have met many people in your life, name one or two great-haired people you thought highly of.

Karen:         You know, that’s a really interesting question because sometimes when we meet people who are in their last years and we’re let’s say in our 40s or 50s, that’s all we know about them. We see that aging process in them. They’re not as active and that’s who we think we know. But when you have time to sit down and have a chat, get their life story and then you begin to ask them questions about themselves. All of a sudden, your feeling is, “oh my goodness, this woman or man has lived an extraordinary life.” So, can I tell about one person there?

David:         Okay.

Karen:         He served on the board of the Medical Ambassadors’ International, an extraordinary faith-based development group. Most of them were medical people who were on the field or on the board who used health as the window to walk into community development all the way around the world.

So, there was one man who they all would refer to and quote him and then finally I met him. He wasn’t on the board, but he was in and out very frequently. I think he was in his 70s. So, I met him at that stage in life. However, this man had gone to Africa as a missionary for Campus Crusade and in the process of being there he began to develop a methodology that was faith-based but he moved from the concept of the white missionary being the authority. So, they moved him out of the leadership.

David:         Not easy to do.

Karen:         Well, particularly at that time, I mean this was 30, 40 years ago, and he then developed a teaching methodology that empowered the ones who were the national workers. And because you had a semi-literate process with some of them and many of them hadn’t been educated but they were leaders in their tribes or their community, it had to be a participatory learning situation. They had to learn by doing.

So, when I began to find out about that methodology and then realize that this was the man who had developed it in Africa, because by the time I came on the MAI board, this methodology was just going like wildfire across the world. Development organizations were picking it up. Mission organizations were picking it up. I mean it was an extraordinary thing. He had worldwide impact. Millions of people were made better because of-

David:         Probably changed the course of mission working a lot of ways.

Karen:         It did. And of course, the degradation of poverty and ignorance. I mean, he was just an extraordinary man. So, I think very frequently we need to look at the gray-haired or white-haired people among us and give them a chance. Let’s get to know who they are and what they have done in their life, where they have traveled, what work they loved and the thing that gives them pleasure looking back on their life. I mean any of those questions, because there’s so much to be learned from them, number one. And number two, they will surprise many of us because we have this American ageism, they’re old and put them in a nursing home or they’ll retire retirement center, where they really still are very vibrant and have much to contribute to intergenerational situations. I love the intergenerational dialogues where you have young, and you have midlife and then you have older because I just think that there’s so much in that.

David:         Would you have been more respectful to that person?

Karen:         Actually, there were all kinds of people like that on the board, but they were younger. I mean they were all kind of world changers, and it was an extraordinary group of people, but he was one who was definitely of the older age.

David:         Talk about it in terms of your family. Do you have the same feelings that people you might not have paid that much attention to because they’re a grandma or grandpa or whatever then all of a sudden you realize that person lived a very extraordinary life.

Karen:         My gram comes to mind. She had been with…

David:         When you say gram that is on your mother’s side.

Karen:         My grandma is my mother’s mother. Now grandma’s not an intellectual, she was a doer, and I knew her mostly because she would come and spend three or four days in our home. Mother was the executive secretary and now I understand she practically ran a world mission because the men were always overseas and so mother was the executive secretary that made everything go. So, gram would come, and she and I were the team that kept the house clean.

David:         How old were you at this time?

Karen:         Oh, from grade school on. She’s always been in my life and when I think back on her sort of my measure my physical ability. Well gram’s 72 and I remember her jumping off of a radiator. She’d been doing the sills on the door and jumped up on it. I think highly of her. What I didn’t realize at that time that hit me later was she was an extraordinary seamstress. This was very typical of that generation. All my clothes were handmade. They were handmade from clothes that had been worn and discarded and she would make clothes for us. But she also worked as a singer sewing machine saleswoman at Marshall Field and Company downtown.

David:         Oh really?

Karen:         One of the big retail shops downtown. One of the classic ones. So, we would go down and then I would see her in her professional life. She wasn’t just my gram running around barefoot and…

David:         Cleaning the house…

Karen:         Cleaning the house and the house dress on. Yeah.

David:          Was elsewhere running mission stuff.

Karen:         Dressed fit to kill. I mean she made her own clothes. They were very tailored, but she was the top singer saleswoman in Chicago in the area for a decade or so. Isn’t that extraordinary? And I remember watching her on the floor at Marshall Field and she immediately established report but because she knew how to sew that expertise was the thing that made her such an extraordinary salesperson. Isn’t it interesting story?

David:         Oh, yeah. Fascinating. OK. What’s good about aging and what is bad about aging.

Karen:         I think the best thing about aging, if you have aged well, is that there’s a wisdom that’s developed over the years that makes you trustworthy and capable of understanding where people are coming from. Those years help you to be a good decision maker. For me there is a lot of tenderness toward people just because I have heard so much of where they’ve coming from the bad terrible backgrounds. Some people you wonder how they’ve been survived.

So, with age comes many, many gifts David as far as I’m concerned. Do you feel the same way? I’m wondering.

David:          Of course. Yeah. But what’s bad about aging?

Karen:          I think the ageism of our culture is one of the bad things of the American culture. I pulled some figures. The proportion of older adults that are 60 years or older in the world’s population is expected to increase from 10 percent to 22 percent in 2050.

David:         That’s a big jump.

Karen:         We have an older population because there’s a declining fertility rate. I mean families used to have five, six, 10 children. Now it’s one or two. So, elderly people are living longer, and their quality of life is a growing concern. In a study one third of adult 60 years or older were classified as successful agers. So, let me just tell you what successful aging is: How it’s achieved. How to stay happy and healthy as you age? Stay socially active with friends and family.

David:         I like that.

Karen:         I mean that we know that in the back of our head that the isolation or feeling it would be more with COVID-19. But having friends being a part of a group if you don’t have close friends join a group they advise. This one we all know, and we don’t do. Stay physically active with regular exercise. Exercising as we age is crucial in order to decrease our risk of heart disease. It decreases developing high cholesterol. Just a whole gamut of stuff. You have to really get that exercise.

David:         Okay I’m going specifically back to you instead of statistics now.

Karen:         Okay.

David:         I accuse you of still having enough ideas to keep you busy for the next 25 years. What is two that you really want to see accomplished. I don’t want more than two or you’ll overwhelm me.

Karen:         Two that are really I feel like the Lord is pushing me to finish this up. One is I’m involved in putting together a team that will help me launch a platform some way digitally yet to be designed but on hospitality. This is a dying form of socialization and there is never time in our American culture when we have need it more. Because of loneliness and isolation that ever happened even before COVID hit. So, what I’m trying to do is develop a program where we will have a national platform but then go into churches and have something that teaches churches how to teach the people to be hospitable how to call out that hospitality to committee people who have a passion for it.

David:         That’s a big dream.

Karen:         That’s a big dream.

David:         Okay.

Karen:         And the second one is to finish the book on listening which you’ve been nagging me about. And I just want you to know that you’re nagging has worked because I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about the project I’m working on. And as the Lord has said to me these are not your projects Karen, they’re my projects. The project Scott is asking me to work on and I was really writing that book in my head. I woke up writing it but it’s on listening and that I think is one of the most powerful tools in our toolkit.

David:         Listening…

Karen:         … to one another. But listening so that person we’re listening to feels listen to heard and understood. When we all feel heard and understood David the brain does what our teenagers in our life would call happy dance and that taptoeing just goes through the entire body.

David:         It’s when they know they have been heard.

Karen:         When they have been heard and understood. I mean their neurological studies on this now brain science is going way beyond anything we ever imagined. They can even tell what chemicals are released when someone feels heard and understood. This is something we all can learn to do.

David:         And certainly, Christians should.

Karen:         Christians absolutely should be doing that right.

David:         Do you have a section of scripture you like that relates to aging?

Karen:         I like that one where precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.

David:         Ok. Death of his saints.

Karen:         I just think that’s such a beautiful scripture for those of us who are old with death closer than it’s ever been to hold in our hearts.

David:         This is about Abraham. It’s in the New Testament without weakening in his faith he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead since he was about a hundred years old and that Sarah’s womb was also dead yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised.

Karen:         That’s wonderful. What a wonderful scripture.

David:         Yeah, okay well all we’ve been doing is just discussing and that kind of brings me to a key sentence which is what I wanted to do. It’s good to talk seriously about aging with someone you love.

I’ll say it again. It’s good to talk seriously about aging with someone you love. Well, I’ve enjoyed talking with you and my feeling is that as people talk with one another and there’ll be numerous conversations there will be great benefit in that.

Outro:         You’ve been listening to the Before We Go podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address, hosts@beforewego.show. That’s all-lower-case letters. hosts@beforewego.show.

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