Well-Preserved

Life Stuff

The year I turned forty, we weren’t at home on my birthday. We were among family after my youngest sister’s wedding, many hours northwest. I kept forgetting that my birthday was even creeping up so close, I was having such a good time.

But that morning, I awoke earlier than usual, and my soul craved a walk. Deeply, I drew in the enlivening air, so much the same as every summer morning, yet so mysteriously new in the freshness of its creation—deeply, somehow, created for me.

In a field to the north stood an old barn, and thither I turned my steps. Thistles, hoary with the success of a summer past and glistening with a kiss of dew, nodded as I went by. I looked at their downy heads with a glance more kindly than usual. They’re getting old, like me. Goldenrod, asters, and milkweed stood tall in silent clusters, smiling at the new day.

I neared the field where the old barn stood. Tick, tick, tick warned the electric fence shocker in rhythmical caution, ticking out the seconds every passing day. Carefully I stooped, eased myself beneath the single wire surrounding the field, and entered the quiet, grassy meadow.

I love old buildings. They tell stories of other lives, of sturdiness, usefulness, and patient aging. They don’t look new anymore, but they still point to past seasons endured. They are a holding-place for memories, whether anyone cares or not.

This particular old barn where I’ve come today is unused, but it is a landmark. I don’t know who built it, so there is no special significance attached to its history for me. But its present condition is what speaks, as it stands lone and weathered in a field my brother-in-law rents for his cattle. I have visited it more than once on sojourns to this community, and the landscape will not be the same when it is gone. It rises decrepit and ancient from the land, constructed long years ago to shelter cattle and hay. Now, boards lie in disorderly piles on its floor and the few remaining bales inside are dark and musty grey. Cousins and friends come here to take pictures against its weathered sides, and newly-turned-forty-year-olds come here to think beneath its sagging rafters.

Birthdays make me reflect, more so the farther life propels me. I note with ever-increasing comprehension how fast time goes, how little chance I have to get it right. Yet I’m thankful I don’t have to do it all at once; only one day at a time. “Life is just the sum of many days,” said a preacher years ago, and I’ve always remembered. Often the smallest things have the biggest impact, and we don’t even know it. The carpenter who built this barn years ago probably didn’t think of how people would enjoy his building decades later. But he put down a good foundation for the need of his day, and therefore the walls still stand.

We don’t always think of it right now, the importance of choosing temperance, kindness, and joy; the foundational importance of humility, spirituality, and praise.

I want to be like this old barn when I get old. I want to be like Bilbo in The Lord of the Rings, whose neighbors still remarked on his “eleventy-first birthday” that he was well-preserved. I want to still be stately as I age, though my face becomes weathered and once-youthful lines sag and the days of shouldering the heaviest loads are past. Even broken places can be places for glory to shine through, like the morning sun sending bright rays between the missing boards of the barn walls, shining in my eyes and welcoming this day.

“How does it feel to be forty?” my brother asked me later that day.

“It feels like I’m about one day older than I was yesterday,” I said.

Isn’t this life? The steady motion of turning pages, ticking moments, changing days—and suddenly you stand at a milestone. Sunset follows sunrise, season follows season, and suddenly, quietly, you’re forty. Nothing is different, yet everything is. Slowly the relentless days with their imperceptible changes remake us from something young and new to something weathered and mature. And the preserving drops of gratitude, joy, and delight that we add to the days help to determine whether that process is beautiful.

I have learned to love the settledness and stability of getting older. I’ve been in my forties for a few years now, and I’m glad I don’t need to redo the life-altering twenties and the heart-stretching thirties. Oh, there are things that alter and stretch me even now, but I’m more secure in the ways I face them and the ways I go about implementing them in my life for reinforcement. The foundations are harder to shake when they are rooted and solid.

The day of my birth was a gift from God, and every succeeding anniversary is my birthday gift from Him, like a sunshine box with 365 gifts to open one at a time, use wisely, and share. I’m not guaranteed ahead of time the privilege of opening them all, though, and at the end of each year, I marvel that I could. And I wonder if I’ve used them the way He expected me to. Every new year is my chance to try again.

Like that old barn, may I allow the glory to shine through, bursting through even the broken places, steadfast and well-preserved as the years weather around me.

This post is expanded and revised from an essay that first appeared in Life Stuff in 2019. Thank you for reading my words.