Dispatch Faith: A Better Way to Think About Old Age, by Wesley Liu (Penn):

Jen Wilkin’s Dust to Dust: Aging Wisely in an Anti-Aging World approaches aging through a Christian lens, arguing that [the] obsession with extending life’s “prime” has never been merely cosmetic. Rather, it’s also based on the belief that we can prolong the years in which we are strongest, healthiest, most productive, and notably, least dependent on anyone else. This is what Wilkin asserts that our culture gets most wrong: We have mistaken independence for dignity, productivity for worth, and youth for the ideal expression of human life.

The result is not simply that Americans fear getting older. We fear becoming people who need other people.

Wilkin’s central insight is that dependence is not a tragic interruption of human flourishing but one of its defining characteristics. From our first breath until our last, we exist because others care for us. The aging process simply exposes a reality that has always been true. As Wilkin writes, growing older means learning to “unlearn the original sin of self-reliance as the aging process gradually, even faithfully, reteaches us dependence.”

Most books about aging focus on how to stave off its physical effects making peace with wrinkles or preparing financially for retirement. Wilkin instead asks what old age is for—and her answer is one of the book’s greatest strengths.

We begin life completely dependent on others. Childhood gradually gives way to increasing freedom and responsibility. Early adulthood is often defined by caring for children, while later adulthood increasingly becomes a season of caring for aging parents before we ourselves return to dependence. Life ends much as it began: receiving care rather than giving it.

This vision exposes a blind spot in modern American culture. We increasingly imagine adulthood, particularly the decades of peak health, productivity, and independence, as the norm toward which every other stage of life points. Children cannot wait to be treated like adults, while adults spend enormous effort trying to appear younger. Somewhere in the early middle decades of life, between youth and retirement, our culture quietly decides that life has reached its ideal form, and every birthday afterward becomes evidence of decline.

Wilkin suggests a far more hopeful paradigm, one in which each season of life prepares us for the next. Infancy teaches us how to receive care. Adulthood teaches us how to give it. Old age teaches us to receive it once again, not as humiliation, but as the final lesson in humility and trust. In that sense, growing old is not life falling apart. It is life reaching its culmination. …

Wilkin argues that aging strips away many of the illusions that dominate youth. As possibilities narrow, priorities often become clearer. Older adults may possess fewer opportunities, but they often gain greater perspective, learning to become “thoughtful curators instead of thoughtless consumers” of their remaining days. The losses of aging are real. But what remains can be quite good.

Old age, then, is not merely the closing chapter of life, but a vocation. Its purpose is not simply surviving longer but teaching the rest of us what human dignity actually looks like. It reminds children that dependence is not shameful. It teaches adults that caregiving is not wasted time. And it prepares the elderly themselves for the final act of trusting others and ultimately trusting God.

Perhaps that is why Dust to Dust says as much about the beginning of life as it does about its end. At 20, I have not yet experienced the losses that Wilkin describes. But I have already absorbed many of the assumptions she challenges. Maybe that is why this book belongs on the reading list of the young no less than the old. A culture that cannot honor dependence in old age has forgotten the purpose and good rhythms of every stage that comes before it. By trying to eliminate the final lesson, we lose sight of what the earlier ones were preparing us for all along. Growing old, it seems, is not the interruption of human flourishing. Properly understood, it is its completion.

Jen Wilkin, Dust to Dust: Aging Wisely in an Anti-Aging World (July 21, 2026):

In This Biblical Meditation, Jen Wilkin Offers Christians a Compelling and Hopeful Perspective on Aging and the Aged

The world tells us at every turn that aging is a steep descent into irrelevance, one to be avoided at all cost. This false story diminishes not only us but our elders and the time God gives us. But Scripture reveals a markedly different pattern of life, one of increasing value, that calls us to embrace our age and number our days rightly.

In this extended exploration of aging, Jen Wilkin draws poetic parallels between the first half of life and the second. Exploring the changing realities of caregiving, abilities, and potentiality, she helps us to trace God’s give-and-take design at every stage. Wilkin offers practical insights on body image, honoring the elderly, the essential value of family, and more. She urges us to trade an anti-aging mindset for the pursuit of biblical wisdom, encouraging believers to lean into―not fight―their place in the true story of the arc of life. 

• A Biblical Perspective on Aging: This book is a thought-provoking resource for those in their 20s, middle age, and beyond
• Thoughtful: Using the metaphor of a chiastic poem, Wilkin explores the symmetry of life and helps us find value in each stage
• Practical Application: Invites Christians to reject the world’s lies about age, pursue wisdom, steward their time well, and serve others as image bearers of God

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