Unless the LORD builds the house, its builders labor uselessly.
Television newscaster Tom Brokaw called them the “Greatest Generation,” having come of age during and survived the Great Depression and World War II and gone on to build modern America. I met some of them by proxy in 1960 by way of their responses to interviewer’s questions asked in the nation’s first study of non-institutionalized older adults—resourceful, creative, doggedly persistent, ever-pursuing purposeful lives.
Yes, lives filled with purpose. Just like the Old Testament scriptures said. Israel’s David, in the Psalms, gave evidence to their character, describing their youth renewed like that of the eagle, which even in old age shed it’s feathers to take on new plumage similar to that of younger birds. Purpose always has a youth ‘gene’rating quality.
And I personally met some of the G-Generation early in this Century as they sought me out for personal fitness training, only now they were 50-60 years older, and I was in my 70s. I wasn’t always involved in the exercise industry. That didn’t come until my wife Carolyn and I began our third profession, she as a group exercise instructor and I as an exercise therapist for older clientele and those with chronic disease.
I was at my desk on the training floor early in the fall of 2004 when Will approached me with a look of determination inconsistent for his 85 years. “Why are you here,” I asked, implying that few are the people who at his age begin to walk the tread-mill or pump lead. “I need to lose weight and strengthen my arms and shoulders,” he re-plied.
I learned Will had spent a career in the military and a second one as a plumber. Now, twice-retired, he wanted to do what people one half or one third his age did. As we got further into the interview, I learned he was diabetic, had high blood pressure and high cholesterol, sported the typical long scar on his leg earned from heart bypass surgery, and had colon cancer. These, added to his obesity and age, indeed rendered him a high-risk candidate for exercise.
I challenged Will again: “Look, you’re comfortably retired, you have no debt; what’s the big deal about beginning an exercise program?” I was relentless in my challenge. But I knew that fitness, by whatever name, was an insufficient motivation to continue exercise for long. I pressed him deliberately. I wanted to know the real purpose for his coming to me. My insistence was based on a fundamental belief: the Creator, with no lack of purpose, had created humankind in His own image; and that humankind itself possessed the divine genes to create purposefully! The world-renowned biologist Edmund Sinnott (dec) when dean of Yale’s graduate school put it another way in his Biology of the Spirit (1955): All living creatures exhibit purposeful behavior. But purpose is a philosophical not a naturalistic concept. Therefore, there must be a purpose giver.
The best-laid plans fail unless we look to God’s providence and He crowns them with success.
Exasperated with my prodding and with a dash of anger Will shouted: “Look I want to make furniture for my family, and I can’t get up to the work bench with this big belly, and I don’t have enough strength to hold my tools! Can you help me?”
Bottom line! Purpose! We had struck the Mother Lode! Now we could start an exercise program geared to Will’s risk factors and one approved by his VA doctors. He had motivation that would last.
Will was not the first for whose down-deep purposes I dug. But I knew they were there. Unfortunately, many fitness trainers avoid, are unable or are resistant to pry for that innermost quality that makes us human and created in the image of the Father. David, the psalmist, once again (paraphrased): The Father knew us when we were yet being formed in our mother’s womb, and He knew all our days before the first of them had been lived.
But alas, for any number of illegitimate reasons, the quip of Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes plaintively groans: Most people go to their graves with their best song having never been sung!
And while this is true for many, it doesn’t describe those who live purposefully or have fitness trainers who care enough to fish the deep waters of peoples’ souls. Consider several from my work who used fitness as a means to reach greater ends across the seasons of life:
– Robert (66) accelerated his rehabilitation exercises following double knee re-placement so he could pick up his wife when she fell due to multiple sclerosis.
– Wayne (85) made toys in his shop and then boxed and shipped them to overseas missionaries.
– Grace (64) retired from nursing and became a volunteer visiting nurse who “gave enemas for Christ’s sake” to homebound older people.
– Bill (76) exercised so he could play scratch golf with his son.
– Terry (78), battling Parkinson’s Disease, started training so he could continue teaching a Bible class.
– Roy (85), a senior Olympian, showed me his new copy of Total Immersion, said he was changing his entire swimming technique, all so he could compete with the 70-year olds.
– Margaret (94) exercised so she could lay aside her cane and walk unaided the long aisle to her pew in church.
Fast-forward to May of 2005. I was giving a lecture on exercise prescription for older adults to several hundred primary care physicians and nurse practitioners at an annual conference at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. I concluded my remarks with a summary of Will’s progress: In eight months he lost 85 pounds, he increased his upper body strength by more than 200 percent, and his glucose and high blood pressure came down sufficient to make him low risk for colon cancer surgery! And then the kicker: None of this would have happened had not Will had a deep abiding sense of God’s purpose in his life and begun an exercise program to birth it!
There was a moment of stunned silence in that cavernous lecture hall, and then the response: some of the doctors stood to applaud while the eyes of others glistened before shedding a tear. Fitness and Father’s purposes had carried the day; Will and Marie momentarily were enshrined in the unwritten annals of how medicine should be practiced and how fitness and wellness trainers gain the higher ground when they go beyond the texts and certification tests and embrace body, soul and spirit in behalf of their clients.
Read more articles focusing on active-aging adults in our 50+ Department.
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