Jen Wilkin Wants to Help You Age Wisely

The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.

0:00:00 – (Jen Wilkin): For me, this moment came with the death of my mother when she was 80 years old and I sat at her bedside and the hospice nurse said I could coach her through the labor of dying, and then sat there and listened to the labored breathing, heard that giant exhale and a crashing silence. And in the days and weeks after processing this sacred moment, I just kept thinking about how her life had begun in a same but different way, with a giant inhale and this wail that announced the beginning of life.

0:00:49 – (Collin Hansen): Only a couple years out of college, I told my coworkers that I looked forward to being old. They weren’t just dismissive of that comment. They were indignant, they were upset. And on one level, I know why. I understood little to Nothing at age 23 about the hardships of aging and caring for the dying. I hadn’t yet suffered many of life’s inevitable pains. At the same time, I looked forward to greater wisdom, maybe even defeat of some sins and temptations, or at least a little bit of progress on those.

0:01:20 – (Collin Hansen): I was excited about all that I could learn if the Lord granted me years, maybe even. I had a couple Bible verses in my head. Proverbs 16:31 gray hair is a crown of glory. It is gained in a righteous life. Boy, I guess if that’s a sign for me, that’s been a pretty success in the last five years. Or job 1212. Wisdom is with the aged and understanding in length of days. Well, both of these verses are cited by Jen Wilken in her excellent new book, Dust to Aging Wisely in an Anti Aging World, published by Crossway.

0:01:53 – (Collin Hansen): If you take my youthful naivete at its I was recognizing what Jen distinguishes in her book. The world says to age is to diminish, but the Bible says to age is to deepen. Now, in middle age, however, I experienced the good and the bad, the invisibility because no one would possibly notice my appearance, but also the freedom because I have that middle aged dad superpower of not caring what people think of my appearance.

0:02:20 – (Collin Hansen): I didn’t realize how much I needed Jen’s book and I’m eager to ask a whole bunch of questions, even more than usual now on Gospel Bound. Jen, thanks for joining me again.

0:02:29 – (Jen Wilkin): Oh, thanks so much for having me on, Colin.

0:02:31 – (Collin Hansen): All right, I’m gonna stay open with the obvious one. Why do we value youth so much more than old age?

0:02:37 – (Jen Wilkin): I think that we. I think we are in some ways no different than any other time period in history in this. But then in other ways very different. Because the ability to magnify that message is so much greater. And social media is a game for the young. And so when you go out to look and see who, who are influencers and like, step back from your understanding of that term as a term that exists out there in social media, think of just what it means. Those who have influence over us.

0:03:06 – (Jen Wilkin): Who has influence over us? When we think about what to wear or what to eat or how to look on our, how our faces are going to look. We’re typically looking at online Personas who if you just look at the statistics, are between the age of 18 and 24, most of them. And so I would say that while every culture has probably looked at the young and said, oh, you know, they’re, they’re kind of foolish, but we do still wish that we had some of what they got our culture is all in on. Nope, I have to stay frozen in time or I’ll become obsolete, just like the technology that I don’t use anymore.

0:03:44 – (Jen Wilkin): You know, we see so many evidences of obsolescence and things that are not actually that old that I think we recognize the potential for that to be true of, of us as well.

0:03:55 – (Collin Hansen): Jen, what’s the first time you can remember thinking, wow, I’m aging, starting to feel old?

0:04:05 – (Jen Wilkin): That’s a really good question. I think it was, you know, I got seriously on my 40th birthday, it feels like I woke up and couldn’t see anymore. And I will never forget my sister in law handing me her readers and saying, well, here, try this. We were at a restaurant and I put them on and I thought I had experienced a medical miracle. You know, I just, because I never have really worn glasses for anything. And I was like, oh my gosh, you just fixed that. You know, and she’s like, yeah, hello.

0:04:32 – (Jen Wilkin): And so that was one of the first things. And then there were things like, you know, you’ll have a dental problem. Like I, I, I chipped a tooth and then I started having dreams about all my teeth falling out, which is apparently really common when you start to recognize the aging process is, is happening in your own body. And then, you know, as my 40s progressed, you had that thing happen where you would just wake up in the morning hu, I don’t know why but you know, other than that, I, Jeff, my husband, he went gray in his 20s. He, he jokingly, but also half seriously says that he got his first gray hair when he was dating me at 21 and he was all gray by the end of our 20s. And I am, you see me before you right now those of you can see me. This is as much gray hair as I currently have. And so I. Yeah, it’s like, oh, I have it. It’s just like around my temples and on. And I’ve known you since you were blonde.

0:05:25 – (Collin Hansen): Exactly like my kids.

0:05:27 – (Jen Wilkin): Yeah. So I think being married to Jeff and see, I mean, he had this really baby face and then this gray hair. And for him, it was so fascinating because the gray hair kind of helped him in his job. He was taken more seriously. But I promise you, any woman listening to this knows that is not the standard for us.

0:05:46 – (Collin Hansen): Well, I was just going to ask, how does agent feel different for men and women?

0:05:50 – (Jen Wilkin): I think that in some ways it feels the same. You know, we experience the same aches. We realize our bodies don’t move the way that they used to. But with regard to the aesthetics of aging, men win. Everybody tends to think of men as improving with age in their attractiveness. And you have only to look so far as Hollywood to understand that the women know they are on borrowed time in terms of how their beauty is perceived and in terms of whether they can even allow. You know, it’s interesting because now the Internet, you can find someone’s age out. It used to be you didn’t know how old someone was. And a lot of women were very happy to keep it that way. Like, it was big taboo to say, can I ask your age?

0:06:36 – (Jen Wilkin): And to some degree, it still is. But we all know we could go out and figure it out online if we wanted to.

0:06:40 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, the old George Clooney effect. There are very, very few women who can pull that off. And we can think of some like Meryl Streep or whatnot. But they’ve also never, not necessarily been seen as sex symbols at a point in their careers.

0:06:56 – (Jen Wilkin): I don’t know if you have seen, of course, my feed since I was doing research on this book. My feed is filled with before and afters of plastic surgeries and all of these different aesthetics treatments because of stuff that I looked up online. And so it’s like, wow, if I thought the Internet was trying to convince me I could be angels before. But it is funny. I shouldn’t say funny, but it is. It’s funny to see some of the men in Hollywood.

0:07:21 – (Jen Wilkin): I don’t know if you saw the Bradley Cooper thing recently.

0:07:23 – (Collin Hansen): No, I did not see this.

0:07:24 – (Jen Wilkin): He did something weird to his face and it’s like, dude, you could have just, you know, you could have aged naturally and women would have thought you were getting more attractive for at least the next 10 or 15 years. So I think that the standards that women have been subjected to potentially will become more difficult for men to escape if the insanity continues.

0:07:49 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, yeah. Why do we see aging as a burden we need to relieve others from carrying?

0:07:58 – (Jen Wilkin): Yeah. From a personal standpoint, I think, because we, I think even if we have some awareness that care for the elderly is very similar to care for babies at the beginning of life. And I don’t say that in a derogatory way, the elderly are full adults and all of that, but this is one of the comparisons that I make in the book. Even though you know that in your old age someone might need to change a diaper for you, feed you soft foods, you’d probably take a nap in the afternoon. I mean, so many similarities between late age and the earliest stages of life.

0:08:35 – (Jen Wilkin): The idea that your children would. Would have to care for you in a parenting capacity of some kind is. It just feels completely off, particularly I think, in American culture where we value self sufficiency, a growth to independence, and we have somewhere along the way, taken in the falsehood that we are supposed to grow to independence or autonomy, which of course we’re never truly autonomous, but to the degree that we’re able. And then we’re supposed to never return to it or we have failed.

0:09:13 – (Jen Wilkin): And if we do return to it, then we don’t want anyone else to have to deal with the implications of that because all of the same care that we rendered for babies, when you render it for someone at the end of life, the potentiality isn’t there. There’s no, quote, payback, so to speak, for, for the labor, at least not, not in terms of that person is going to die. You know, they’re not going to get better.

0:09:37 – (Jen Wilkin): And so I do think that when we think about asking adult children or some other family member to provide that care to us, it feels like we are actually robbing them of something. We perceive no mutual benefit from that. And you can see this in the statistics on medically assisted end of life in Canada, I think it’s 30% of those who request to be a part of Maid Maid do so because of a belief they’re a burden.

0:10:08 – (Collin Hansen): So let’s just jump into that right there because that’s a perfect segue. I wrote my newsletter recently about this phenomenon related to the defeat of assisted suicide in Scotland and then the House of Lords in the uk And I was asking somebody involved in that fight because it’s already legal in 13 US states in Washington D.C. it’s also a major cause of death in Canada right now. And I remember asking, what was it that was decisive in the defeat? Unexpected defeat in the House of Lords, but then also especially in the Scottish Parliament.

0:10:40 – (Collin Hansen): And I said, is it the people with disabilities that were protesting? Was it? And he said, no, people didn’t really care about that. He said the feminists turned against it. And he said they put two and two together, realizing that it is a woman’s responsibility and burden to care for others her entire life. And they realized that once they became burdens to their families, especially to the men in their families, the men would pressure them into relieving them of the burden of having to care for them.

0:11:19 – (Collin Hansen): And that’s how they saw it. Is that surprising to you at all?

0:11:22 – (Jen Wilkin): No, no, I actually. Well, I mean, I think it’s interesting that feminists have started to be able to connect the dots on some of the things that are sort of like baseline mago day issues in the church. I actually find it very encouraging because I would love for there to be within the church a pro woman outlook that doesn’t have to be labeled feminist with all of the negative connotations that third wave feminism brings with it.

0:11:48 – (Jen Wilkin): We’ve seen the feminists sort of like shake out of their stupor around transgender issues, and a lot of the transgender conversation runs parallel to our anti aging mindset in the culture. And so it doesn’t completely surprise me, but it is gratifying to find strange allies. I guess I would say.

0:12:11 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, yeah. I don’t think before your book I could have quite understood it exactly that way. But when it comes from the mentality of I don’t want somebody to be a. I don’t want to feel like a burden and then others will treat you like a burden, including your own sons or your own husband or.

0:12:31 – (Jen Wilkin): Well, and I think one of the reasons that the feminists woke up before somebody else did is because, and I’ve talked about this a ton, I don’t get into it a lot in the book, but about it’s the adult experience of women not to outgrow interdependence, like, to not outgrow our vulnerability, physically speaking. It is the purview of men to outgrow vulnerability. And so it’s interesting too, because it was a feminist who I heard observe during a podcast that I was listening to observe that the only way that an adult male rediscovers that he is not in fact autonomous is if he lives long enough to age out of autonomy.

0:13:13 – (Jen Wilkin): But it’s the reality of women our entire lives, we walk down a dark alley with a different mindset than a full grown man does. And so anytime you have an intuitive understanding of vulnerability and that’s not a ding against men, I actually think there’s a reason. I mean, that’s pre fall design that men grow to relative autonomy in a way that women don’t. But I do think it means that it’s not surprising to find that adults who don’t are the first to start to recognize the analogs. And you know, even since finishing the manuscript, increasing I think I mentioned it in passing in the book. But anyone who has walked through the thought processes around how do we dignify those with special needs, whether children or adults, can make a pretty quick connection to the fact that aging that goes into extremity is essentially similar.

0:14:10 – (Jen Wilkin): That vulnerability that you experience, it can be cognitive as well as physical. And so if we don’t get it right with senior adults, those of us who call ourselves whole life pro life supporters are really only giving lip service to that because in particular, with the way statistics are looking with the population, we’re going to have to figure out what it means to say actually we’re built to burden one another.

0:14:40 – (Jen Wilkin): Although I would argue it’s not a, it’s not a burden, strictly speaking, it’s a heavy thing to carry, but it’s what we’re built for.

0:14:47 – (Collin Hansen): Well, this feels like peak. Jen Wilkin, the Chiasm of Life. Okay, so, and it’s, and it’s, it’s brilliant because all of a sudden, I mean, your title Dust to Dust is so excellent, but when you put it in the context of the chiasm of life, it becomes draws out, comes out even more. I just can’t believe, Jen, I’ve never heard of life explained this way. Never kind of seen that experientially or biblically myself.

0:15:18 – (Collin Hansen): So I want you to one, just explain what is the chiasm of life. But then number two, of course, in terms of biblical interpretation, the middle is what we’re being drawn. Our attention, our attention is being drawn to typically. And you have middle age there, so what’s the significance of that?

0:15:35 – (Jen Wilkin): Okay, so just chiasm 101 is, it’s a form of ancient Near Eastern parallelism, which I thought every PhD theologian is going to just hate that I paid more attention to chiasm. They do not love them. And I have a gentle disagreement about their importance. Importance, because chiasm’s basically a form of parallelism that is different from what we’re used to in the modern west, we are accustomed to a joke with a punchline at the end or a story with a moral at the end. We expect end stress that you find out the main point when you get through the whole story.

0:16:13 – (Jen Wilkin): But a chiasm is different. It starts with these exterior parallels and then it moves inward in sort of like concentric layers until you hit the midpoint. And the midpoint is actually typically the. The main idea. So a really usually one people can recognize is Psalm 139. It opens with oh Lord, you have searched me and known me. It ends with search me and know me, O God. And so you can map parallels into the middle of this very well loved and well known psalm.

0:16:46 – (Jen Wilkin): But if I hear this psalm taught, most likely what I’m going to hear is that the main point of the psalm is I am fearfully and wonderfully made. But actually the center stress falls on the line after that, which is wonderful are your works. My soul knows it full well. The emphasis is on who God is, not on the creature. And so it does matter that we pay attention. And I think the reason that you can find these structures all over the Old and New Testament is because those original receivers of those words didn’t hold a copy of the Bible in their hands for their entire. None of them did. They, they heard the Bible read to them. And so I think that the chiastic structure is a. Is the Lord’s kindness to an auditory recipient.

0:17:43 – (Jen Wilkin): It’s. It’s a memory tool. But also I think that the reason we see it everywhere and that it appeals so much, like you have to kind of ask what’s the appeal of it to these, these ancient writers. And I think it’s because it easily observable in nature itself, like natural revelation testifies to it. So a sunrise and a sunset look very similar, but they’re same but different. And so then you start to think, wait a minute, what about human life? And for me, this moment came with the death of my mother when she was 80 years old.

0:18:17 – (Jen Wilkin): And I sat at her bedside and the hospice nurse said I could coach her through the labor of dying. And then sat there and listened to the labored breathing, heard that giant exhale and a crashing silence. And in the days and weeks after processing this sacred moment, I just kept thinking about how her life had begun in a same but different way with a giant inhale and this, this wail that announced the beginning of life.

0:18:51 – (Jen Wilkin): And so then I got curious and I thought, I wonder if you couldn’t map this inward. And that’s what I do in the book, I map it inward. We look at each little layer of life and the similarities. So, you know, I won’t go through all of them here in the, in the interview. But for example, adolescence, think about all, you know, you go through hormonal changes, you get a driver’s license, you win all of these independent abilities and rites of passage.

0:19:20 – (Jen Wilkin): And then at the other end of life, when you’re in senior adulthood, you’re giving all of those things back. And it’s so funny because even in helping care for my aging parents, you know, we’ve joked other, other adult children my age, we’ve joked with each other about how non compliant they can be if you try to force a rule on them. You know, like, hey man, you don’t need to be driving at night anymore. And they’re like, you don’t tell me what to do. And, and I just think, gosh, I would have been a way worse. I was a super obedient teenager and I, you know, maybe I should, should have gone back and, you know, taken my shot back in the day of being rebellious. And, and so, you know, it’s funny, but it’s also, it, it helps stir compassion in you because a senior adult is not an adolescent.

0:20:08 – (Jen Wilkin): They’re a, they’re a human with years and years and years of lived experience. And so they’re, they are due a degree of respect. They will never be your child, even if some of the ways that you provide care for them are echoes of the kind of care they provided for you when you were an adolescent. But I do think that it’s contingent on adult children to be mindful that when parents were making those sacrifices when you were a newborn, when you were a toddler, an elementary age child, an adolescent, they did so without a thought for the cost.

0:20:46 – (Jen Wilkin): And that as adult children caring for them in their extremity, we should do our best to do the same.

0:20:52 – (Collin Hansen): Oh, what about the midpoint then? The middle stress is that just because the overlap of care hits there, you’re caring for children and you’re caring for parents?

0:21:02 – (Jen Wilkin): Yeah, I mean, you know, honestly, it depends. The chiasm is a guide. But obviously we know everybody’s lives bring different variations of this to them, but we can recognize the general pattern. And I really struggled with that after I started to see how many close connections there were between beginning and end, you know, on either side of the midpoint. And to ask myself, well, so then does that mean that the main point of life is Midlife, that didn’t sound right.

0:21:31 – (Jen Wilkin): And I think as someone who is just past that point, I flatter myself. I’m 57, so I’m not going to live to be 114, so I guess I’m considerably past it at this point. But. But I think that midlife, you know, we talk about being over the hill, so which there again, there’s that innate sense of, oh, there’s a curve to this. And I think at midlife, you’re right at the pinnacle. And if you’ve ever hiked a ridgeline or a mountaintop, you know that when you’re up at that top point is when you gain perspective both on the way you came and on the way you have to go to get back down.

0:22:10 – (Jen Wilkin): And so I think that. That all of the second half of life is filled with that kind of perspective. But midlife is perhaps the first and best opportunity to weigh it and then to start living according to it. Now, I think there are people who will do it before midlife, and that’s a gift. But midlife is kind of like maybe your first best chance and in some ways your last best chance to grab perspective.

0:22:36 – (Jen Wilkin): We’ve seen plenty of people hit midlife and toss perspective to the wind and buy a sports car and get a new wife, et cetera, et cetera. And how unseemly for the children of God to operate according to the same panic buttons as the rest of the world.

0:22:53 – (Collin Hansen): That perspective imagery is so perfect because you’re understanding so much more about what you went through growing up and then relating to your parents through that. But as you’re relating to your parents in a new way with greater appreciation, but also watching them do the same things that your children are doing. Like you said, same but different. In there, you see both sides.

0:23:21 – (Jen Wilkin): Yeah. And there’s a temptation to infantilize your parents, you know, And I think, too, if we don’t bear in mind what they did for us, we’ll be slow to return the favor. And I think, you know, it’s so funny when I’m giving parenting advice to younger parents, I’m always saying, hey, don’t miss that turning point from, for lack of a better term, rule giver to consultant. Right? So somewhere around middle school, you start putting that monkey on their back probably a little before that, so that they’re taking on responsibility.

0:23:55 – (Jen Wilkin): And I’m learning now that on the other side of the. Of the curve, there is a point at which you have to start recognizing the age your parents are, and that while they have always been the one who took care of you. It’s time for you to start actively anticipating how they will need you to take care of them. And it’s another one of those pivotal moments where if you miss it, you’re going to expect something of them they’re no longer able to do, and you’re going to feel frustration or disappointment or confusion or you might actually move toward it too quickly and start thinking that you’re supposed to parent them.

0:24:36 – (Jen Wilkin): And neither of those things are true. And so it’s a very delicate. It’s a very delicate assessment, but I think we walk toward it with a lot more compassion and wisdom if we’ve been good students of how the first half of life went.

0:24:50 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah. It’s so personal for me, Jen. Yesterday when we’re recording this, we’re just following Mother’s Day and yesterday having lunch with my mother in law, we were simultaneously talking a lot about the kids. My youngest is four and she does a lot to help and care and spend time with those kids, which is something you talk about in the book we’ll get to a little bit later. And at the same time we were talking about the home that she wants to move into. She’s 81.

0:25:22 – (Collin Hansen): She was describing where and she’s not ready to go there now and nobody thinks that she is. But we were talking about this new development going in and she’s saying that’s where I want to go. That’s the first time we’d had that conversation. So we’re having both of those conversations at the same time now because of lifespans, those conversations are not normally happening in that same way, which you also talk about in the book because for infertility reasons, my wife and I were later with kids and then she was also later with kids. So that’s why we have the much wider expanse, almost like a generation that’s missing in there somewhere. But yeah, this book hit me personally in so many different ways.

0:26:01 – (Collin Hansen): Probably because of that place in midpoint where I’m out of the diaper phase on the one end.

0:26:08 – (Jen Wilkin): Yeah.

0:26:08 – (Collin Hansen): But not far from it on the other.

0:26:11 – (Jen Wilkin): Yes. How old are you?

0:26:14 – (Collin Hansen): 45. Yeah, 45. Just turned 45. Also a middle aged dad thing to have no idea how old you are.

0:26:20 – (Jen Wilkin): Yeah, but you are, seriously, you’re like right at the middle. You know, you are, you are. You’re the midlife example and you actually fit with the way the book is written fairly. You know, that sort of that general sense of it other than that your, your children are younger and you’re, you’re, your parents are a little older and it is hard. And I think, you know, you guys had infertility issues. It’s fascinating to me how many people delay childbearing on purpose without any thought for how it might impact their ability to care for, for those, those they love at the end of life. And, and I will say I would have, this would have been me if Jeff Wilkin had not said, hey, shouldn’t we start having kids? I’m like, hey, I, I got stuff to do. You know, we’re doing that now.

0:27:05 – (Jen Wilkin): And so I can’t be harsh on people, but I can say that in my mind, I had no thought for caring for my parents. My parents didn’t want me to think about caring for them. Their worst nightmare was that they would ever become a burden to us. And so not only did I not have that expectation, they didn’t have that expectation. Now, thankfully, that has changed, but, but it has been easier to care for them without having to care for my own. I am caring also for grandchildren at this point, so I’m straddling a couple of generations as well, but happily so I have the discretionary time to do it because of where my adult children are in life.

0:27:45 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, yeah. Well, interestingly, who I was describing there for Mother’s Day, that’s my mother in law. My own mother is so my in laws and my parents are both ends of the boomer spectrum, youngest and oldest. So my parents are. My mom was 22 when she had me. So very different there. So even with both sides of parents who are all still living, very different concerns, stages for both of them, very different stages. To be in your mid to late 60s is not the same as being in your early 80s, though. They’re still all healthy and all in their homes without any changes there. But I just thought this book is so incredibly helpful for all the different ways that it roots you biblically and theologically and historically and culture, but also helps you to apply things personally to wherever you are in that chiasm. I don’t think, I don’t know exactly who I’d recommend the book to specifically, because as I look at it, I think, well, if you’re in middle age, whether my middle age or your middle age is very applicable in multiple directions. But if you’re younger, like you just said right there, it might help you make different decisions about marriage and childbearing.

0:28:56 – (Collin Hansen): You might think about things you had taken for granted because of our culture. And at the same time, if you’re older it might actually also give you quite a bit of perspective on what you’re going through and what other people who love you are going through in your own aging experience.

0:29:12 – (Jen Wilkin): I think the thing that I just kept running into as I was writing the book was how I had naively sought that caregiving was like this one window of time in my life.

0:29:23 – (Collin Hansen): Oh, good point.

0:29:24 – (Jen Wilkin): You know, like when my. When my own children were little, and you know how they’re like, oh, you only have them for 18 years. And so you kind of get in your head, I’ll have these caregiving years, and then I’ll be an empty nester and I’ll be free to travel the world or do whatever, and then eventually I will die. And what. What just kept coming apparent to me was not only that all of life is caregiving for most of us, but what a gift that was.

0:29:58 – (Jen Wilkin): Like, I thought caregiving was a season of life to sort of be survived. And I think who better than Christians to understand that caregiving is a default setting, not a stage that you enter into and out of? I mean, Jesus says all kinds of things about that, but I think we don’t really realize, oh, he means all of life. And that for many of us, the servanthood that we will enter into will be for family members. Not for all of us, for all. For some of us, it will be people who are not family.

0:30:33 – (Jen Wilkin): But. But I just. I think I thought there would be a lot of years that were sort of like those college years where I just, you know, the euphoria of I just have me to take care of. And some people never even got that. There are people who are more aware of this and were aware of this earlier than I was. My mother, I mentioned in the book she had multiple sclerosis. And she wasn’t diagnosed for a long time because I think the idea of the diagnosis was overwhelming to her. So she avoided it.

0:31:05 – (Jen Wilkin): But she was having health issues related to that. I mean, even when I was in high school and they got more pronounced, she had a very gradual case of it. She was actually mobile until her death, but just, you know, that was about to be gone from her. So even when I was in young adulthood, I was watching her face challenges as she aged related to mobility and being able to take care of herself. She was fiercely independent.

0:31:34 – (Jen Wilkin): And so the fact that I had navigated a lot of those conversations with her in my 30s and 40s meant that I was more able to think toward how to handle them with my dad and my stepmom and Jeff’s parents as well, knowing that it was only a matter of time before they would face similar. Similar issues. And so I feel like what happened with Jeff’s parents was just ideal. They moved a block and a half away from us and it was just such a gift to have them there. It was a gift for so many reasons. But caregiving, not least of those.

0:32:10 – (Collin Hansen): So interesting, Jen, the way that we don’t assume that all of life is caregiving because that would have been all of life, obviously to almost every generation. Generation before us, the last couple generations in there. Because you’re generally not. I mean, a lot of people did live old lives, but in general, the window between having kids and having a lot of kids and then having your parents die nearby you.

0:32:40 – (Collin Hansen): That was just completely normative.

0:32:43 – (Jen Wilkin): Yes. Yeah. What’s the saying? Life is brutal, nasty and short, I think. And for most of human history, people didn’t delay childbearing because first of all, they couldn’t. It was pre sexual revolution.

0:32:57 – (Collin Hansen): Exactly.

0:32:58 – (Jen Wilkin): And secondly, why would you. If average life expectancy was 25 to 30, 35 years, which is the majority.

0:33:05 – (Collin Hansen): And half your kids, half your kids are dying in childbirth.

0:33:09 – (Jen Wilkin): Yeah.

0:33:10 – (Collin Hansen): Don’t live beyond the age of childhood. And you also. And a lot of the women aren’t surviving their childbirth. Childbirth either.

0:33:17 – (Jen Wilkin): That’s right. So you had infant mortality, you had death because of wars and illnesses that we avoid. Like I was sitting there thinking, I didn’t put this in the book, but I was thinking about how many times I should have died before now. But modern medicine has. Has prevented. I had appendicitis, I could have died. You know, the vaccines I’ve had, the. Sorry. Hope that’s not a hotbed issue, guys. The. The times I’ve had antibiotics for things that might have taken me out.

0:33:47 – (Jen Wilkin): I got a tetanus shot after I busted my knee open. You know, just the simple things we take for granted, which could have been life ending or life altering broken bones. You could be lame for the rest of your life. And so the length of life we enjoy, the quality of life we enjoy, health wise, are truly unprecedented in human history. And yet we’re just greedy for more.

0:34:12 – (Collin Hansen): I had a persistent problem. The combination of air pods and water giving me ear infections which would result.

0:34:21 – (Jen Wilkin): Don’t swim in your AirPods there.

0:34:23 – (Collin Hansen): Well, it was the like working out, basically.

0:34:26 – (Jen Wilkin): So sweat or the combination of that.

0:34:29 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, or the combination of that and then swimming or something like that afterward. And it would be like nine out of now. That’s insulting to any woman who’s had a child. I don’t know what else to say. No, you’re being stabbed in the brain. You are correct with an ear infection. And I’m thinking that is an easy antibiotic to be able to cure, to fix.

0:34:53 – (Jen Wilkin): But what did people do?

0:34:54 – (Collin Hansen): Would have died. I just would have died now. I would have had AirPods. So maybe I would have avoided that problem. But how many different.

0:35:01 – (Jen Wilkin): Colin, I affirm this because I’ve had ruptured eardrums twice from ear infections and I think it’s worse than childbirth. And I’ve had four. Four babies.

0:35:11 – (Collin Hansen): I’m not saying it. You’re saying that. But I could just say when I sat in the emergency room after three hours and they said, what’s your pain level? And I said, I’m embarrassed to say this, but it’s nine out of ten. I’m being stabbed in the brain right now.

0:35:24 – (Jen Wilkin): It’s bad.

0:35:25 – (Collin Hansen): It’s so bad. So you think about. Think about your babies and when they have the ear infections, of course it’s not.

0:35:30 – (Jen Wilkin): And then you feel so bad when you don’t find out until three days later. I mean, that’s me. That was me. Where I’m like, oh, that’s why you’ve been. Oh.

0:35:38 – (Collin Hansen): But we live. The theme here is that we live in this kind of ignorant sense. It’s not all of us, of course, but we live. This modernity allows us to live a mirage more so than others have. And I see people living that mirage into their 70s and into their 80s, still not coming to terms with that. I’m writing a book about C.S. lewis right now and Screwtaped Letters is talking about war’s not as good of a thing for the devils as they think because it makes everybody think about death.

0:36:12 – (Collin Hansen): And death is inevitable, so it’s used by God there. And so you can see that this ignorant seeming bliss that we live in that we’re not going to die is evil.

0:36:25 – (Jen Wilkin): Yeah. And I mean, it’s the oldest shiny offer in scripture.

0:36:31 – (Collin Hansen): There you go. Yeah.

0:36:33 – (Jen Wilkin): The first thing the serpent says, it always says, you will not surely die

0:36:37 – (Collin Hansen): and you’ll be like God.

0:36:37 – (Jen Wilkin): Yeah. And that’s what every esthetician is telling you. It’s what everybody with their vitamin regimen is telling you. And again, I am not saying don’t take vitamins. I’m saying that even if you take the best vitamin regimen in the world, you will surely die. And you live life differently when you take Moses advice and you number your days that you may gain a heart of wisdom. And it’s chilling or it’s sobering, I should say, to recognize that our days are numbered. And anyone who has ever had. I mentioned this in the book.

0:37:13 – (Jen Wilkin): Any health crisis that you have at any stage of life or that a loved one has is a wake up call. And you experience what is a documented phenomenon called the narrowing of priorities, where all of a sudden you have clarity around what matters and what doesn’t. And so the fallout of believing you will not surely die is that you never experience the mercy of the narrowing of your priorities and the likelihood that you will chase after lesser things.

0:37:42 – (Jen Wilkin): For. For most, if not all of the additional life expectancy years that this generation has been given seems pretty high.

0:37:52 – (Collin Hansen): Well, I walked through that process with Tim Keller. Three years of pancreatic cancer, the narrowing of priorities toward legacy. Of course, that’s why I worked on the book with him and started the Keller Center. If he died suddenly of a heart attack years later, would we have done those things? I don’t know. Maybe those priorities would not have narrowed. But one of the things he talked about, which. Then another friend, Ben Sasse, going through the same thing with pancreatic cancer, one of the things that he and I talked about with that as well was Tim’s sense that pancreatic cancer was a get out of jail free card.

0:38:28 – (Collin Hansen): It was his way of being able to say no because he didn’t like to say no to people, say no to anything because nobody could ever question him. That’s the narrowing of priorities there.

0:38:37 – (Jen Wilkin): That’s right. And from a different vantage point, I’m experiencing that now with my adult children. I’m sorry, my adult parents and my grandchildren. It’s like, yeah, I don’t care if you want me to come speak at your event. I know. I know what matters most. I know what I will regret more. And it’s not missing your event. And every Wednesday I spend the day, I drive an hour and 40 minutes and spend the day with my dad and my stepmom.

0:39:06 – (Jen Wilkin): My dad is 86. My stepmom turns 80 this. This Christmas. She’s a Christmas baby. And never have I ever gotten home on a Wednesday night and thought, man, I could have used that day for something else. And. And it is mutually enjoyable. You know, they’re always like, oh, thank you for coming. And I’m like, you don’t have to thank me for doing something that I thoroughly enjoy. And so I just think that. That I didn’t have any expectation of how rewarding and joyful it would be. Now I do understand that not everyone has the relationship with their adult parents that I do and with their aging parents. And I also very much understand that aging calcifies people in ways that can make. They either make them even sweeter to be around or even more miserable to be around. And that’s why this is a particular form of caregiving that because you tied to it also that there’s not potentiality like they’re not going to go become a neurosurgeon because you cared for that. You know, those decisions are all in the rearview mirror when you have a difficult parent who you’re trying to honor in their late years of life.

0:40:23 – (Jen Wilkin): That’s its own, its own shaping force on you, the individual, as well as on them.

0:40:34 – (Collin Hansen): Two different situations that I have known about and experienced, both of them with mothers with dementia at the end of their lives. And one was, I mean, it was just did not go well at all. There was no redemptive experience in it. It was a reminder of years of pain and separation and disagreement and, and all that. And then another was a change in the other person with dementia’s personality to be less critical, nicer, sweeter.

0:41:09 – (Collin Hansen): And the caregiving became an opportunity for like, wow, I wish we’d spent our whole lives that way. But I’m glad that I had these months and these years together. So obviously dementia is a horrible thing. It’s an evidence of the fall, but it can go in strange ways. You just don’t really know how that’s going to. It’s going to end badly. You know that, but you can’t exactly plan all of that. But speaking of that, again, on this caregiving theme I preached a few years ago on the 5th Commandment and persistently misunderstood.

0:41:48 – (Collin Hansen): I mean, its application would have been very clear and practical to just about any other culture, including the original Hebrews following Moses. What, what is it that makes it so hard for us to understand what the Fifth Commandment is trying to say?

0:42:01 – (Jen Wilkin): Yeah, well, we take it out of context. And I also think, you know, I had written a book on the Ten Commandments right before my mom died, and I had really been struck by exactly what you’re. You’re describing, that it is such a bigger call to obedience than I had ever contemplated. And then you’re like, oh, shoot, this feels, feels hard and not easy. And I, I had mentioned in the book on the Ten Commandments how the original utterance of the Ten Commandments is really directed at adults. It’s not like, it’s not like God stops looking at the Adults and looks down at the children gathered at the foot of Sinai and says, you know, okay, this kids, this one’s for you.

0:42:46 – (Jen Wilkin): And it actually had so much to do with the well being of the nation that once they got into Canaan, there needed to this generational transfer of wealth and the wealth was in the form of remembrances, like they needed to what’s the call in the Old Testament? Over, over again. Remember, remember, remember what the Lord has done for you. Don’t forget, don’t forget, don’t forget. And so what older generations have is a repository of remembrance that is vital for the next generation.

0:43:19 – (Jen Wilkin): One generation has to tell the next of the wonderful works of the Lord. But what the fifth command was saying is, hey, adult children, for the sake of the good of the community, you need to take care of your aging parents. Now it doesn’t mean that there weren’t also applications for small children. My mom loved to quote that one. She would say, if you want to live a long time, you better honor me. And she by and I for sure know she didn’t mean you better take care of me when I am not able to take care of myself. Because she did not want that.

0:43:50 – (Jen Wilkin): That. But that’s the great irony is that, you know, the nation of Israel actually functioned according to a clan system and it was its own sort of social welfare arrangement for this people who were an autonomous group distinct from other nations, where in order to not fall into debt, they had provisions, debilitating debt in order to not starve, in order to not go naked, you know, they had ways of provision within the community.

0:44:19 – (Jen Wilkin): And it is all of the things that Jesus says that show you to be a true follower of Jesus, where he says, you know, when I was thirsty, you gave me drink. When I was hungry, you fed me. When I was naked, you clothed me. When I was in prison, you visited me. And I think about that like extreme age is an imprisonment in your, in your own body. And do we think about that when we think about visitation for those who are in prison? That there are those who, I mean, you can say the same of many people who have some special needs consideration.

0:44:51 – (Jen Wilkin): You can visit those who are in prison when their body is a prison for them in a particular way. It’s why we do hospital visits and things like that. And so the fifth commandment has in view, to borrow from the Westminster Catechism, any who are our superiors in age and wisdom, whether that is in church, home or commonwealth, I think is the way that it’s said. And so this is an idea that is. Is lost on our culture.

0:45:19 – (Jen Wilkin): And sadly, that cultural loss has crept into the subculture of the church as well.

0:45:25 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, Talking with Jen Wilkin here, her new book, Dust to Dust, Aging Wisely in an Anti Aging World. Don’t worry, Jen. I’ve saved all my best questions for still to come. Okay, so we’re just getting warmed up here. I got a few more. I got a few more here. All right.

0:45:42 – (Jen Wilkin): Right.

0:45:44 – (Collin Hansen): Will you retire?

0:45:45 – (Jen Wilkin): Well, so I probably won’t, but I have the luxury of a profession that ages well. So, you know, I read Arthur Brooks From Strength to Strength when I was putting together this book, and he does a really great job of talking about how we age from fluid knowledge to crystallized knowledge. There’s a natural progression of that. So young people have fluid knowledge. They’re able to ideate and come up with the new ideas and innovate and tons of energy to execute on those ideas.

0:46:17 – (Jen Wilkin): And then as you get older, you lose that ability. And crystallized knowledge, in other words, sort of the interplay of all of the accumulated knowledge of years begins to pay off. And so I’m seeing that in the Bible study world, where I feel like I’m finally getting good at biblical theology because I finally have enough just knowledge of scripture to be able to intuitively make connections. Connections.

0:46:40 – (Jen Wilkin): So there are certain professions that leverage crystallized knowledge and certain that leverage fluid knowledge. Crystallized knowledge is in things like academia. The longer you teach something, the better you get at teaching it. And that’s why I think a lot of times you see people move into academia as they age, where they may have been in a, like an industry job that required more fluid knowledge early on.

0:47:05 – (Jen Wilkin): And so I don’t have plans to retire because I have the great luxury of a profession that ages well. But I do think everyone does need to think about what will happen when their intellectual skill set, for lack of a better term, begins to shift toward crystallized knowledge. I would recommend that book. I thought it was very insightful.

0:47:31 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, yeah, it is. And. Well, I mean, I’m saying boat, but I do think difference for me is that I do a lot of the same things that you do, but I also have institutional leadership responsibilities. Those are hard to sustain, both for the energy, the travel, the presence, the motivation. I mean, over time, that surely wanes. And also just it’s not always the best stewardship. You’re not always the best person to be able to do that for some of these same reasons and also because of some of those shifting circumstances.

0:48:12 – (Collin Hansen): So my Thought has been my books and my teaching and generally my writing and speaking probably can travel through age, but at the same time you were demonstrating earlier some of the narrowing of priorities and saying no to certain things so you could make more money, you could do a lot of things, but those will be trade offs. And that is another aspect of retirement or aging. It’s just a recognition of those trade offs that this will cost me time.

0:48:47 – (Collin Hansen): And time matters, it always matters.

0:48:50 – (Jen Wilkin): Time becomes increasingly valuable, but it feels most of it you have exactly more

0:48:54 – (Collin Hansen): valuable to us there. And then often you have more money at that point. And sometimes. I mean, one thing I often think about with young kids is what am I saying no to right now? Because I don’t think I have enough money to do it. But I would give anything later, any amount of money that I have in abundance then to go back and do.

0:49:19 – (Jen Wilkin): Oh, that’s a nice way to think about it.

0:49:22 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah. Well, in a motivating way to say I don’t think I can do this right now, but my 65 year old self would say I’d throw anything at that.

0:49:34 – (Jen Wilkin): Yes. Yeah.

0:49:35 – (Collin Hansen): So trying to understand that interplay between time and money. And also just realistically because of where my kids are in age, I can’t and shouldn’t travel the way that others could in my job.

0:49:49 – (Jen Wilkin): But I think that projecting forward is the thing most of us avoid doing. We think of that, that other side of the hill as sort of this fuzzy, don’t want it, can’t even. I have no creative imagination around how it might happen. And then nothing is certain anyway. So I’m just gonna live for today.

0:50:09 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there’s a balance because tomorrow’s not promised to any of us, as Jesus reminds us. So there’s a way to be both wise proverbial wisdom we talked about there, but at the same time to be entrusting that all to the Lord who cares for every hair, numbers every hair in a head and cares for the sparrow. All right, now Jen, the big question here that you and I have been talking about for forever, you do not give a clear list of do and don’t when it comes to hiding the effects of aging. And I know you know that that’s a deliberate attempt not to exceed your mandate and maybe also not want many people angry at you.

0:50:46 – (Collin Hansen): So how do we discern whether or not to pursue those procedures? And you make a good point. Maybe this does is more acute for women, but you gave the example of Bradley Cooper earlier that it’s not exclusive to Women. But how do we discern what to do there and what not to do?

0:51:01 – (Jen Wilkin): Well, what I wanted to do with the book is show that that’s actually such a secondary question that most of us have not done the initial work that we need to. We need a theology of time, we need a theology of the body, we need a theology of aging before we can understand how our decisions impact that theology. And then when it comes down to our decisions, I would say what Jesus says, and that is, I am concerned about the posture of your heart before I am concerned about any other action that might result from the posture of your heart. And everybody knows that two people can do the same thing.

0:51:51 – (Jen Wilkin): Action from two very different heart postures. I would argue that when it comes to much of what is being peddled to us in terms of anti aging, that the messaging is not just anti aging, it is anti Christian because it’s anti gospel. Because what the gospel it says is, change the inside and you’ll make peace with the outside. The anti gospel works in the opposite direction. It says, change the outside so that you can make peace with the inside.

0:52:32 – (Jen Wilkin): And so, you know, I would say one of the things we talk about in the book is how we live in the age of radical individualism and the autonomous self, which means that even in Christian circles, we will say, well, you just. You do know.

0:52:47 – (Collin Hansen): You.

0:52:47 – (Jen Wilkin): You. You figure it out. And I don’t think we can say that. I think that that is the reason that you hear almost entire silence on this coming from pastors, because God help that man who stands up on a Sunday morning and dares to say, that’s not enough of a response. And that’s why I thought it was important for a woman to write the book. Because there are particular questions that women have to wrestle with that are there are unfair standards that women have to wrestle with that men don’t.

0:53:21 – (Jen Wilkin): And so I would hope, if you’re a pastor listening to this, that you would exhale a little and be like, okay, well, maybe I don’t have to be the one to break the silence, but I do think we have to break the silence. And even as I was writing the book, I thought, gosh, there’s so much more to be said. Like, even since I finished the manuscript, I’ve thought of so many more things there could be to say.

0:53:40 – (Jen Wilkin): My best hope for the book is that it will be a place to start. Conversations will not resolve everything there is to resolve on this issue. But I kept looking around and seeing no one is talking about this. And if they do. Lord help them. And the reason that it was going so sideways is because there are so many underpinnings for the conversation. Everybody wants to know, well, so can I dye my hair or not?

0:54:05 – (Jen Wilkin): And the conversations always get reduced to almost frivolity, frivolousness, because there are so many other questions to ask first. And so that’s what I’m hoping to do in the book.

0:54:19 – (Collin Hansen): Oh, I think you execute on that brilliantly. I see exactly what you’re doing there. This is the question you have. This is the question you should be asking.

0:54:29 – (Jen Wilkin): Yes, Right, right.

0:54:30 – (Collin Hansen): Is a consistent pattern. Like, you’ll have clarity on the answer that the question you’re looking for here, if you understand what’s happening here.

0:54:39 – (Jen Wilkin): We need a good wisdom paradigm for aging. But everybody recognizes, or I hope everybody recognizes, wisdom is not law. Wisdom is situational. And so I can’t drop into your world, you know, don’t DM me should I do this procedure or that procedure, because wisdom is situational. But also, don’t persist in acting outside of a wisdom paradigm and peppering someone else with questions that have wisdom freight to them.

0:55:10 – (Jen Wilkin): You will stand before the Lord and answer for your actions, and so do the hard work. That’s what I want the book to do, is to help people begin to do the work of analyzing. Why do I feel like this is something that’s just kind of a you do you boo moment? Is any decision in life a you do you boo moment and then going from there?

0:55:33 – (Collin Hansen): Most helpful part of the book for me, Jen, was when you listed your regrets. I want to learn from Jen Wilkins mistakes.

0:55:46 – (Jen Wilkin): Well, there are, you know, there are two ways that the Lord teaches us. One is through watching other people act like idiots, and the other is through learning it the hard way. So I read books, you’re welcome, world,

0:55:56 – (Collin Hansen): and have a podcast. I mean, this is a. This is a bold move. I don’t see books a lot like this. How did you decide to list those? I mean, share just a few of them here, just how you processed through some of this. But, I mean, part of why it was helpful to me is I like learning this kind of wisdom. I like the intentionality about it. It’s probably one reason why you and I are friends, but also because I am just a little younger than you and because my kids are younger, there are things that I can change or that I can learn from and that I can do. And also some decisions that we’ve made about where we live that are similar to the decisions that you made about where you live.

0:56:41 – (Jen Wilkin): Yeah, I think that I got to the end of the book and I had said some challenging things, I think in the book. And I really wanted readers to know that I am not above the challenging things that were said. Like I never want to tell someone else to self examine on something that I know is going to be potentially feel like a punch to the gut that I have not already had to walk through that punch to the gut myself. And also I think some of it was that I was picturing my kids reading the book and they know me, you know, like I.

0:57:26 – (Jen Wilkin): And I remember I sent the manuscript to my daughter Mary Kate, and I didn’t know, you know, how you get to that stage in a. Writing a book and you’re like, this could have been a huge mistake, I don’t know. And my son in law Nathan, drops onto the family text a picture of Mary Kate and he says, well, she finished the book, book and it was her sitting on the couch and she had a diaper rag over her eyes held by her glasses and she was bawling.

0:58:02 – (Jen Wilkin): And I start bawling because I thought, well, even if nobody else gets it, Mary Kate knows this is my true self in this book. Like I haven’t held anything back. And she also knows the truth behind the gains, the great gains that I talk about because she’s lived them. When I talk about four generations of Wilkins spending an afternoon together, that’s her and her kids in that part of the story. So I felt so grateful that she, in her twenties, already recognizes the reciprocal benefits of honoring the elderly.

0:58:45 – (Jen Wilkin): And not in a, not in a, not just in a philosophical sense, like in a very practical sense. And I think, gosh, I wish I had known that. I wish I hadn’t been so dumb. You know, I don’t know if I, I can’t remember if that was one of the things I put in there, but I was so dumb, I was so vain when I was her age, so vain. And I know that that’s just kind of how it goes. Like a lot of the things that I get into and that that list at the end, I recognize it’s hindsight.

0:59:15 – (Jen Wilkin): Like it wasn’t going to go differently because that’s who I was. But we don’t. You know, the beauty of sanctification is you don’t stay who you were. And so some of the things I put there, as much as they are confession, they’re also a celebration that the Lord has done a work in me and he knew exactly what it would take to do it so and I don’t look back on it as like, like a discipline that was unkind, I think is a discipline that ended up being a blessing even as it was something hard.

0:59:46 – (Jen Wilkin): So that’s what I hope for everyone. And I fully recognize all families are different things happen at different points in life. We have different relationships with our parents. My relationship with my mother was a hard one. I can’t romanticize it. And yet showing honor to her, I will never look back on that with regret. Never, never, never. I only think, I think I could have done more. You know, those are the only regrets is that I didn’t figure it out soon enough and that I didn’t do more.

1:00:20 – (Jen Wilkin): And I can look on those regrets with charity for my former self.

1:00:26 – (Collin Hansen): Well, we’re the better for it, Jen, from learning from you and learning with you in that sanctification process. And it’s reflecting on our own lives and how they differ. Boy, there’s so much more we could talk about here. We’ll have to pick up that conversation in person another time. The book is Dust to Dust, Aging Wisely in an Anti Aging World. The author, my guest here, Jen Wilkin, the publisher, Crossway.

1:00:52 – (Collin Hansen): Great book. I think it’s going to start a lot of those conversations, just like you’re hoping and praying. Jen, thank you.

1:00:58 – (Jen Wilkin): I hope so. Thanks for having me on.

1:01:07 – (Collin Hansen): Thanks for listening to this episode of Gospel Bound. For more interviews and to sign up for my newsletter, head over to tgc.org gospelbound Rate and review gospelbound on your favorite podcast platform so others can join the conversation. Until next time, Remember, when we’re bound to the gospel, we abound in hope.