Do you know any old ladies? I mean the ones gerontologists refer to as the “old-olds”?
They are in their late 80s, their 90s and even 100s. With our advancing technologies and expanding life spans, there are more of them out there than you realize.
One of the reasons you may not see them is the societal tendency to forget about them. Churches may not see them either. They have shrinking bank accounts and consumer influence.
Kirsten Christensen Roberts
I’ve learned through personal experience that whatever these women lack in physical resources and abilities, they are a goldmine of wisdom. Wisdom that could help us grow in understanding and tolerance.
The Spirit gave me an admiration and attraction to women in this age bracket starting when I was 13 and began helping my grandma make fruitcakes and tea towels to sell at the annual Christmas Bazaar. This fundraiser was put on by the Soroptimist Club, a club run by women to help younger women. It was an ancillary group that quietly sprang up from Women’s Suffrage in the 1920s.
One of my two grandmas, Mabel Valentine Christensen, established a Soroptimist Club in Chico, Calif., in the first half of the 20th century. She did this while having five children and helping my grandpa run their jersey dairy, starting each day at 3:30 a.m., milking their cows by hand.
Over the past five years at my small community United Methodist church, more than a few members of my peer group took their big tithes and left our church loudly in a huff because our pastor began to preach more and more, ever so slowly and from the Bible, that full inclusion of LGBTQ persons is Christ-like and the direction our denomination should be going.
You know who never left? The old-old ladies. Not a one. Every week they continued to show up with their walkers and canes, sitting quietly, knowing in their weather-worn souls that this too would slowly pass, just as the other injustices they had lived through.
I have the privilege of knowing many of these women quite well from planning a monthly “egg salad sandwich” lunch date, followed by board games. Most of them are widows of naval officers who fought in World War II. These women had many children while moving along with their husbands around the world in service to their country. And still found time to be schoolteachers and Girl Scout troop leaders.
Some people think hanging out with old ladies is a sacrifice of my time. I will admit the logistics of finding a date, among all the medical appointments, when these old saints can all attend and then physically getting them all there when none of them can drive does take hours.
But the time in their presence is a gift I give myself. A gift of service that helps distract me from the resentments I harbor from any discrimination I’ve experienced as a female. Time spent putting it all into perspective and appreciating what these old gals have withstood to move the needle along and get us to where we are today and will be tomorrow if we listen and steadily act.
There are so many lessons I’ve learned from these untapped resources over my life that I’d like to share here. But I’ll start with one of the most profound. My other grandma, Martha Warkentin Penner, was an “Okie,” a migrant agricultural worker, who as a school-aged girl traveled by walking behind a covered wagon from Oklahoma to California when her family’s work quite literally dried up. When I was an ardent pro-lifer right out of Christian college, my grandma quietly told me what it was like for her mother to slowly walk her seven children to California with only the amenities of a covered wagon, all the while listening to her cherished babies cry from hunger. My grandma wisely intimated to me that the option for her mother to have an abortion versus the slow torture of poverty was something at least worth considering. It took years for me to fully glean the magnitude of this story and to acquire some much-needed empathy.
It’s our personal experiences, the people we know, that change us.
It’s how the wife of a naval admiral gets her husband to take Irish clogging classes after his retirement. It’s gasping with another whose naval aviator husband spent all the money she’d been saving for furniture in their newlywed home on a yellow convertible! And laughing with a dear friend about her sneaking up on the stage to dance with Elvis during “Blue Suede Shoes,” after telling her World War II veteran husband she was going to the restroom. The best part of the story I would have missed if I had not been listening is that the concert security officers “held her” until her husband came to claim her.
Growing up Baptist, I was instructed often to learn to be a good wife and mother and a fine lady from the older women in the church. Oh, how right they were!
Kirsten Christensen Roberts — Christensen is her father’s name and Roberts her husband’s — has made these names her own with a long marriage to her husband, Jim, their two grown kids and many wise older women. She graduated from Biola University in 1987 and had a long career as a CPA in banking and finance in Orange County, Calif.