ON A GORGEOUS crystal-clear afternoon, walking along the lakeside path toward our sailboat, my husband and I passed four boys fishing by the path. In reply to some question that I couldn't hear, one of the boys remarked that he was waiting to cast his line—because he didn't want to hit "the old lady."

As I glanced around, it suddenly struck me that I was the only person he could have been referring to. Who, me? Surely, I didn't hear him correctly? Regrettably, though, my husband had also heard the remark. So there it was.

Instantly I recalled my teenage daughter's stunned look just days before, when she walked in the door from school. Stopping on her way home to fuel up the car, she had been called "Ma'am" for the first time, and it had really thrown her for a loop.

That got me smiling, and thinking! Where is the time threshold between youth and old age anyway? Isn't it merely perception? I asked myself. Through my study of Christian Science, I was familiar with Mary Baker Eddy's description of time as "mortal measurements; limits, in which are summed up all human acts, thoughts, beliefs, opinions, knowledge;..." (Science and Health, p. 595).

Society seems to love to measure, categorize, and limit people and things. Assigned certain attributes to the chapters of our lives, we are expected to follow a pattern of mental and physical behavior. Somewhere in there, we presume to go from youth and promise into age and decline. One only has to spend some time looking at how television commercials and magazine advertisements target the teenagers, young adults, mature adults, and seniors, to recognize these limits.

But I have found that the Bible steps in to remind us that our heritage is one of dominion, and that the infinite God alone governs our lives (see, for example, Gen. 1:26, 27). Illustrations of this dominion can be found in the stories of people such as Enoch, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Moses, and Aaron, just to name a few. They give different examples of God-given freedom and dominion over the accepted limits of aging. Another Bible character, Caleb, continued to be as strong at 85 as he was at 40, something attributable to his being a faithful servant of God (see Joshua 14:6–11). And Psalm 92 promises that those who plant their trust in God "still bear fruit in old age and are always green and strong" (verses 13,14, The Good News Translation).

Several years ago I found out how practical and effective this spiritual dominion can be. At the time, I had been having trouble with pain in my legs. It was sometimes very difficult to do all the walking required of me at work. I found myself assuming that the pain and stiffness were probably part of the aging process, and that this might always be a problem.

But then one day, as I was leaving my son's school building after volunteering in his classroom, my perception of the problem changed. At the front door of the school, I met with a bouncing, singlefile kindergarten group heading into the building. As I held the door open smilingly for them, I was touched by the reflected grins the children gave back. Their pure joy and unburdened exuberance were so evident that for a moment I longed to feel that youthful freedom. Then I noticed the last person in line. The teacher, probably in her 60s, had the same bouncing, joyful exuberance, as well as a huge grin on her face. So much for my original estimation of the scene, I thought ... no age barriers here!

Seeing that joy reflected in the students as well as the teacher was a little window on the agelessness of the qualities we reflect from God. And it really got me thinking. It also helped me realize that to accept pain and stiffness as the inevitable effects of aging was to agree with a false estimate of my identity as God's daughter, and actually to accept a self-imposed limitation. I had mentally stepped across an assumed age threshold and bookmarked a chapter called "Youth and physical freedom," as well as starting a new chapter of pain and aging.

But as I began to pray, I got a new view of myself as God's reflection, which includes full dominion over all material limitation. A promise from the Bible's book of Job completely summed it up for me: "Thine age shall be clearer than the noonday; thou shalt shine forth, thou shalt be as the morning" (11:17).

It became clear to me that agelessness and immortality, joy and freedom, were legitimate for me as the image of God, while "mortal measurements" were invalid and clearly not from Him. My new goal was to keep this spiritual view in thought as I went forward with my workdays. In everything I did, I focused on how to reflect more of the bounding joy and freedom I had seen in those kindergarten children and their teacher, in addition to many other ageless qualities such as freshness, spontaneity, and flexibility.

As a result of this shift of thought, I found the pain gradually fading away. This was proof to me that the pain I'd been experiencing was not material, not an effect of aging at all, but rather a false assumption devoid of actual power because it never originated in the divine Mind. In my prayers I continued to claim my God-given dominion, until I was soon completely pain-free.

This experience, and others like it, have shown me the importance of ageless thinking, based on spiritual truth. This has an outward effect. In other words, focusing on our identity as the reflection of our infinite God reveals our freedom from all limitation. As our perception of who we are changes from material to spiritual, it becomes clear that there's no need to cross some presumed time threshold into old age. Science and Health puts it this way: "The admission to one's self that man is God's own likeness sets man free to master the infinite idea" (p. 90). Grasping this truth, anyone can gain more of this freedom from mental and physical limitations, to write a new chapter of increasingly fulfilling, progressive years.

I love the idea of seeing all God's creation as ageless, expressing seamless life, with no chapters that leave youth in the past or mandate aging as inevitable for the future. Now, thinking further about that afternoon on the lakeside path, I realize that as we continued toward our sailboat, I was able laughingly to say to my husband, about the boy's remark, "At least he called me a lady!" |css