“Even to Old Age and Gray Hairs” (Psalm 71)

There are mornings when prayer feels like standing before ruins. The ruins are not someone else’s, not the world’s; they are mine. The years stretch behind me like a long road, and when I turn to look back, I see both light and ash. God has been good, so unfathomably good, but that goodness has often passed through fire. The older I grow, the clearer it becomes that life itself is a battleground, and that I have often walked through it blind, unaware of the warfare raging over the soul.

Psalm 71 gives voice to something that stirs in the bones of the weary: “Do not cast me off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength fails.” I feel that plea rising like a cry from my own chest. My body weakens, my mind wanders, and the familiar demons find cracks in the walls I once thought were secure. They whisper despair, self-pity, and bitterness. They mock faith, suggesting that surrender is a kind of death. Yet it is this very death, this naked surrender, that God seems now to be asking of me.

There is a reckoning that comes with age, not only with mortality but with the truth of how I have lived. I repent, not as a gesture but as a groan. I see how I clung to illusions of strength, how I sought comfort in my own sufficiency, how often I mistook distraction for peace. The warfare was always there, subtle and relentless. I thought I was untouched; I was only asleep.

Now illness and frailty tear away the veil. Every ache in the body becomes an icon of the deeper ache, the longing for God unfiltered by pride or performance. The Psalmist’s words become my own breath: “You have taught me from my youth, O God, and to this day I proclaim your wondrous deeds. So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me.” It is not the cry of fear, but of trust born through battle.

To live this surrender is to face the darkness without flinching, to stand unarmed before the enemy and still whisper the Name of Jesus. It is to let God be God, even when His ways undo every certainty. The Psalm reminds me that the story is not finished, not while breath remains. The same God who carried me through youth and ignorance will carry me through the unraveling of age.

The warfare continues, but so does grace. And perhaps this is what it means to grow old in faith: not to have fewer battles, but to learn to stand still in them, hands open, heart bare, waiting for the mercy that has never failed.