I’ll be turning forty-eight this year, and I’ve been pondering aging and youth. I don’t feel as young as I used to. I’m working on a pretty nice collection of silver hairs on the crown of my head, and there are parts of me that don’t recover as quickly from a long day of yard work. At the same time I know I’m still squarely in that stage of life called “middle age,” and a lot more aging is yet to come.
I’ve also been thinking about my lifelong spiritual journey and the people who have shaped me and are continuing to shape me. I work at Ozark Christian College, so I am surrounded by young adults every single day. These young folks are on the cusp of many big adult shifts, and for almost two decades I’ve had a seat on the sidelines to watch so much goodness unfold. They inspire me and challenge me. It’s hard not to be moved by them; they carry in new ideas, new ways of thinking, new words (always with the slang!). They rejuvenate me, and many days I feel younger because of their energy and enthusiasm.
I have several older friends who continue to show me what it looks like to keep on growing and learning and pursuing this lofty goal of Christlikeness. Some of them are becoming grandparents, some of them are entering retirement, and all of them have a lot of living under their belts. They’ve seen immense loss and great joy, and they keep on getting up to greet each day despite the lack of a guarantee that life will go how they want it to. These friends ground me, and their wisdom directs my steps. Their faithfulness gives me the courage I need to continue to step into future stages of life.
This ability to regularly rub shoulders with people older and younger than I am may not be unique to the Church, but it’s one of the more beautiful parts of the design for the body of Christ. Over the years my husband and I have been part of several small groups, but there are two in particular that made this design become a fleshed-out reality for us. The first group was a mix of twenty-, thirty-, and forty-somethings. I was in the twenty-something category at that time, and my husband had just shipped off with his National Guard unit to Iraq. Our son was only nine months old, and I was hours away from any family. That group of sweet believers became a lifeline to me, and part of the beauty of that group was the intergenerational nature of it. I needed what each stage of life had to offer me. I needed the other young couples to commiserate about the trials of toddlerhood, I needed the thirty-somethings to show me what it could look like to persevere in life and at work, and I needed the older couples to speak truth to me, the truth that comes from perspective, experience, and wisdom. (This group celebrated with me when my husband returned from Iraq, and they held us up while we endured the difficulties that many other veterans’ families experience.)
Many years later, my husband and I were part of another group, only this time the ages started in the mid-twenties, and the oldest members were in their early sixties. I was in the late thirties/early forties category and had a middle schooler at home by this point. We walked each other through significant life events, we prayed for each other, we cried over one another, and we laughed (sometimes until we cried). I am struck again, even as I write this, by how much I needed them; if we didn’t meet, the week felt like it had a limp—something wasn’t quite right. They were my fellow sojourners, and my spiritual journey would have been bleak without them. I could not have become who God wanted me to be without them.
I have a stack of memories from those small groups: coffee and prayers holding together the grown adults crammed together on a couch or making do with a pillow on the floor, the dinners together where we balanced paper plates on our knees while we shared our heartaches, the times we served together and told stories and jokes to pass the time—these were all forming me, shaping me, making me. I am not a Christ-follower on my own. Or at least not a very good one. To follow Jesus is to be in community: a living, hugging, cookie-eating, laying-hands-and-praying community.
Our son is all grown up now and is making a life for himself hundreds of miles away from us. We talked recently, and he said that he had been invited to join a small group at the church he has been attending for a few months. He was told that he might be the youngest one there. It took everything within me not to shout into the phone, “Do it! That group of families and retirees may just be the best thing to ever happen to you!”
Jessica Scheuermann
Jessica is a part of our Christ’s Church family and serves as Academic Resource Commons Director & English Professor at our Impact ministry partner, Ozark Christian College.
Jessica is pictured here with her husband, Ryan, and son, Josh.
