Honoring The Aged
“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be prolonged in the land which the Lord your God gives you.” - Exodus 20:12
Winter has a way of stilling the world. When the vibrant rush of springy greens fades into distant memory. When summer’s warmth and laughter drift away like fading smoke. When autumn’s fiery kaleidoscope surrenders to an unrelenting gray. When squirrels no longer scamper along its shaky shoots. Then the trees stand bare against a cool blue sky, with branches etched like fragile veins—a memory of humming life fading into a beautiful and haunting silence. And there is beauty in all of this, a stark yet trembling kind of holiness that lingers in the breeze of a crisp New England air. So it is with our parents as they reach their winter years.
The ones who once stood proud and strong—sheltering us beneath the wide canopy of their strength and steadfast love—now find themselves walking through the twilight of their years alone. Their steps falter. Their vigor fades. Their stories loop in gentle circles, and we lean in closer to catch the words that once rang clear. The hands that once gripped tools and carried burdens are now traced with the delicate lines of age, quivering like January branches beneath an icy gusting wind. And while we bask in the bright abundance of our own springtimes and summers—our careers blooming, our children laughing, our ambitions rising like fresh leaves—somewhere deep within us there stirs the quiet temptation to drift away from the very ones who once drew us near. We would never call it neglect; we would never name it dishonor. Yet the silence of an unanswered phone and the hum of an overfull calendar whisper the truth more honestly than we do. The ones who spent their strength for us seldom receive it back in return. It is the tragedy of the modern West: a culture that despises birth and mocks the womb also despises gray hair and forgets the hands that raised it.
And yet, God’s command for the aged remains unyielding, undiminished, unfaded by the slow slippage of time. It is a moral law for every people and every place: “Honor your father and your mother.” Unlike things drawn in crayon or sidewalk chalk, which are vulnerable to both the wind and the rain, the Word of God is etched into eternity, chiseled into reality itself. And like every Word that proceeds from His mouth, it stands immortal and unchanging—a cornerstone not only of the Decalogue but of the created order itself.
The Hebrew word kabēd—from which our English word glory (kavod) is derived—means “to honor.” It carries the sense of weight, of gravity, of something so substantial it cannot be brushed aside or taken lightly. To honor, then, is to treat our parents as weighty and precious pillars in the architecture of our lives, not as relics in a museum of fading memory. It is to recognize that the ones who once carried us now lean upon us—not by the blind rhythm of nature or some evolutionary herd instinct, but by divine design. God Himself wove this holy reversal into the fabric of a fallen world as an act of grace. It is the sacred passing of a baton from one generation to the next—a continuity of love that, when kept, sustains homes, strengthens nations, and steadies the world under the sovereign hand of God.
To brush aside an aging parent, therefore, whether through irritation, avoidance, or the quieter sin of indifference, is to insult the very hands of the Creator who fashioned them. The face we unintentionally ignore still bears His image; the voice we stop hearing still carries His breath. To turn from them is, in some measure, to turn from Him. Yet to stoop beneath their frailty, to steady their shaking hands and listen with patient tenderness, is to imitate the Lord Himself, who did not recoil from us in our own weakness. He shouldered our infirmities as though they were His own and carried us, faltering and faithless, up the hill of our redemption. The point is simple, every act of care for an aging mother or father becomes a small reenactment of the Gospel of Jesus Christ —a son or daughter bearing the aged is to profoundly walk in the footsteps of the Son who bore the world.
A Culture of Forgetting
We inhabit a culture that worships youth and trembles at the whisper of age—a world that idolizes vitality while denying the inevitability of death. It is a tragic paradox: a generation that flirts with death in its art, its politics, and its pleasures, yet panics at the first wrinkle on its skin. We exalt the bloom of spring and despise the hush of winter. We build temples to youth—neon-lit gyms lined with mirrors that promise immortality, industries devoted to bottling the fountain of youth. At the same time, we sanctify self-destruction, calling physician-assisted suicide an act of dignity. And for the elderly we cannot convince to take part in their own undoing, we send them away to climate-controlled tombs called nursing homes, where CNAs and RNs know their stories better than their children do. Scripture calls the gray head a crown of glory (Proverbs 16:31), yet we—armed with all our enlightened arrogance—can only muster the occasional “OK Boomer” when faced with the perspectives of men and women four times our senior.
Yes, generations differ, and no generation stands above reproach or beyond critique. Every age has its blind spots and sins. But that is no excuse for trampling the Fifth Commandment or treating the aged as nuisances, burdens, or punchlines. Differences in culture and custom cannot annul the eternal law of God. Honor is not conditional; it is covenantal.
Our modern world has forgotten this. We measure “quality of life” by what a life can do for us, not by the One in whose image it was made. We erase wrinkles with Botox and call it progress. We close the womb and then wonder why our parents die alone. Having refused to bear children at a rate that could sustain our elders, we have created a civilization that grows younger in spirit but colder in soul. And now, as we chase our self-made idols of convenience and autonomy, we are left to watch an entire generation die in quiet rooms, starved not of food but of affection.
We are the rising generation that confuses rebellion for maturity and calls emancipation a virtue. We flee from the very dependence that once kept us alive, mistaking autonomy for strength and self-sufficiency for freedom. Yet dependence is no defect—it is the design. It was planted in the soil of Eden, when Adam discovered that even in paradise he was not enough. It pulses in every newborn’s cry for milk and in every saint’s daily prayer for bread. We were made to need—made to lean upon God and upon one another. But instead of embracing that holy dependence, we build lives of isolation. We chant “family values” while signing the consent forms that ship our parents to facilities with names like Silver Pinesand Arbor Acres—places that gleam with a veneer of care but echo with hollow absence. We outsource compassion like a chore, hiring strangers to feed the mouths that once fed us, to wash the bodies that once carried us, to comfort the hands that once steadied ours—and then we soothe our consciences with the vocabulary of mercy. We spend billions to preserve our youth, yet cannot spare a single afternoon to preserve our parents. What, then, has become of us?
This tragedy is everywhere. It waits in the grocery aisle, where an old man lingers by the produce hoping to spark the first conversation of his day. It sits in the retirement home cafeteria, where a woman steadies her trembling hand to apply her lipstick, still hoping that today will be the day her son walks through the door. It stares out from the empty chair at Thanksgiving that no one notices anymore. We have become a generation of voluntary orphans, trading our parents for promotions and our homes for the treadmill of busyness. We have convinced ourselves that we are exchanging weakness for strength—that their frailty is a liability and our focus is an achievement. Yet in discarding what we thought was weak, we have only weakened ourselves. In turning from the faces that formed us, we have hollowed our own souls, mistaking motion for growth and ambition for life. We have forgotten the grace of aging gracefully, and in doing so, we have forgotten how to let others age with grace. We are a people who have exchanged the ancient art of honor for the shallow cult of perpetual spring. And we are not the better for it.
A Call to Remember
Dishonoring aging parents rarely erupts in open rebellion. It begins in small forgettings—in love postponed, in presence withheld. It is not always marked by harsh words or public scorn; sometimes it hides in busyness, in silence, in the polite cruelty of distance. The skipped call becomes a month; the postponed visit, a year; love, once warm and bright, cools to brittle frost. We think we have merely delayed affection, but in truth we have begun to starve the soul.
Honor, by contrast, is not passive. It is not merely the avoidance of harm, but the active pursuit of good. It flowers in remembrance, in showing up, in bending our crowded calendars around the people whose sacrifices made those calendars possible. It is an act of worship as much as affection, because the authority of parents was never self-invented—it was delegated. To honor them is to honor the God who entrusted them with His image and His care. Their stories are the roots of our own, the soil in which our lives first took hold. Neglect those roots, and the tree itself will wither.
To forget our parents, then, is in some measure to forget God. They were His first earthly gift to us—His image-bearers placed beside our cradle (Genesis 1:27). When we turn from them, we turn from a reflection of His face. But when we stoop beneath their weakness, when we listen again to the looping stories and steady the trembling hands, we imitate Christ Himself. For the One who sculpted the stars once submitted to a woman’s womb (Luke 1:38). The Commander of seas obeyed His parents in Nazareth’s obscurity (Luke 2:51). The Sustainer of all things (Colossians 1:17) apprenticed in the humility of a carpenter’s shop. And even when the nails tore His flesh and the sky grew black, He honored His mother—entrusting her to John with His final breath (John 19:26–27). The cross was the ultimate kabēd—the Son bearing the will of His Father and atoning for every child who ever looked away.
A Gospel Charge
This is our pattern and our pardon. Our neglect placed Him on the tree, yet His perfect obedience to His Father now clothes us in mercy. And that mercy is not meant to make us passive—it awakens us. The same grace that forgave our dishonor now empowers our honor. The cross does not cancel the Fifth Commandment; it engraves it upon our hearts. Having been reconciled to the Father, we are summoned to reconcile with those who first bore His image to us.
And that reconciliation must take shape in life, not theory. So, go to them. Visit them. Pick up the phone and let your voice be the sound that breaks the long silence of their day. Drive across town, across states if you must, and look them in the eyes that once looked endlessly upon you. Sit in the living room that still holds your childhood photographs. Ask them to tell the old stories again, not because you haven’t heard them, but because you finally understand what they cost. Take them out of the home where strangers know their daily routines better than you do. Bring them to your table, to your home, to your life. Let them hear the laughter of your children again. Let them die surrounded by covenant love, not by paid caretakers and fluorescent lights. Honor does not have a price, and no parent should face the shadow of death in a room of strangers.
Thank them—not for perfection, but for perseverance. Thank them for the years they held you when you were helpless and for the prayers they whispered long after you stopped listening. Call them simply because you delight in their voice. Ask forgiveness for the silence. Lay down the armor of pride that has kept you distant, and hold their trembling hands with the tenderness of one who knows he too will tremble one day.
You say you love God—prove it by loving those through whom He gave you life (1 John 4:20). You say you long for revival—then begin it at home. Revival does not start in pulpits or stadiums; it begins in the quiet corners of living rooms and nursing homes, in reconciliations whispered beside hospital beds, in the warm tears of sons and daughters who finally come home. True reformation starts when prodigals return not only to their Father in heaven, but also to their fathers and mothers on earth.
For this commandment still carries its promise: “That your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you.” God has tied the health of nations to the honor of children. Where sons bless their fathers and daughters cherish their mothers, the land flourishes. Where they scorn them, societies dry and crumble. The family is the first government, the first sanctuary, the first school; poison it with dishonor, and every other institution decays.
So repent. Dial the number. Bridge the miles. Write the letter. End the silence. Go get them. Bring them home. Tell your parents they are not forgotten, that they are not a burden, that their presence is not an inconvenience but a blessing. Show them in their final days the same covenant love that Christ has shown you. If the Son of God could honor a sinful mother, so can you. If He submitted to imperfect parents, humility can bend your pride. The home is heaven’s apprenticeship; those who will not honor their parents are not yet ready to honor their King.
