We were also made very grateful that Jean Belz did not live longing to be forever 21, but trusted in her Savior as the days and decades went by

In a recent Chattanooga Times Free Press, an article on the front page of the business section noted that a local Belk department store floor will be leased to a specialty fashion retailer with the name “Forever 21.”

While the Forever 21 website offers no background for the name, it’s not hard to imagine the thinking: Today’s Americans idolize youth, and, no matter what a person’s age, it’s apparently desirable to dress and look and act and try even desperately to be forever 21.

Just this past weekend, as my wife, Kathleen, and I ate breakfast in a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, hotel, we looked around at a good number of fellow guests, probably close to our ages (56 and 54), who were—how shall I put it?—striking examples of this phenomenon.

Well, count us out.

I have many wonderful memories of my 21st year. That was the year I fell in love with the woman who would become my wife, as we toured the Loire Valley on our way from Paris to Nice during a summer French studies program.

That was the year my path to doctoral studies at Vanderbilt University was settled when I received a Danforth Foundation fellowship.

And I think it was the year when our Wheaton College tennis team won a conference championship. It was, by most standards, a very good year.

But forever 21? No way! After thirty-three years of marriage, I love my wife—and she loves me—vastly more broadly and deeply than during cet été magique en France. My doctoral studies have served me well in both college teaching and now administrative posts, but the course of my vocational life has been far more richly diverse and interesting than I could possibly have imagined then. And, as much as I enjoy tennis, other recreational delights have crowded it almost entirely out of my life.

And of course there were aspects of being 21 which I’m sure I don’t remember as well: uncertainty about the outcome of our courtship; questions about future family, about jobs, about health and finances, about just about everything! Truth be told, I think I enjoy my 21st year now, looking back on it through the lens of God’s providence across thirty-five years, more than I did—and ever could have—back then.

Now I should add that, at Covenant College, Kathleen and I are surrounded by loads of 21-year-olds, and we really, really enjoy them. So it’s not that we are down on 21-year-olds; we’ve had three ourselves and that was a good year for every one of them. But in God’s good providence life goes on, and that’s a very good thing.

I suppose it was sovereignly ironic that we read the article on our way to Cono Christian School in Walker, Iowa, just north of Cedar Rapids, where on Saturday we attended the funeral and interment services for Jean Belz, the remarkable matriarch of the Belz family. Jean’s husband Max was one of the founding board members of Covenant College back in 1955, and their eight children and almost all of their thirty-one grandchildren attended or are attending Covenant. Their second oldest child, Joel, has served on the College’s board of trustees, off and on, for thirty-some years.

Mrs. Belz died at 91, having spent the last sixty-two years of her life serving in a myriad of roles in and around Cono. Learning the story of her life—a lot of it difficult—and seeing the evidences of God’s radiating blessing through her moved Kathleen and me to find being forever 21 even less attractive.

What lessons Jean’s many years taught her and those around her! What burdens she bore! What bright and joyful moments she knew, all along the way—through her twenties, and then her thirties, and then her forties, and then her fifties and sixties and seventies and eighties, until she died peacefully on August 31. What the world would have missed if, by some strange twilight zone quirk, she had remained forever 21!

For a full hour before her funeral service, the gathered family and friends sang many of her favorite hymns and heard read many of her favorite Bible verses. After the service, her grandchildren pulled her casket, gently laid on a specially made cart, around the Cono school campus one last time—a campus with hardly a square inch where her feet had not trod, hardly a flower that she had not tended, hardly a memory which she had not somehow shaped and shared.

Then the rest of us joined the procession across a field to the small cemetery where the body of Jean’s husband Max is buried, and where now, after Reverend Eric Duble’s good words and one more song, the younger Belz men lowered Jean’s casket into a simple, deep hole, and all the Belz family, one by one, lovingly dropped handfuls and then shovelfuls of rich Iowa soil on the wooden box that holds her earthly remains.

Kathleen and I were so very glad to have been there. Certainly the day included vivid reminders of many dear connections with the past and present of Covenant College. And it was a deep and lasting joy to join our voices in song with Julie and Joel and Mark and Mary and Tim and Nat and Andrew and Sara and all their families. We heard again and again the story of God’s redeeming grace in Jesus Christ, and of the hope of the gospel that will carry us on into the very presence of our Savior.

But we were also made very grateful that Jean Belz did not live longing to be forever 21, but trusted in her Savior as the days and decades went by—as she looked after generations of Cono students for more than sixty years, as her hands were made strong and rough and beautiful by the work that God gave her to do, as her hair turned a lovely pure white, as she laid her husband in the ground, and then as she finished her race and was laid in the ground next to him.

Throughout the day, one thing was crystal clear about Mrs. Belz: She lived her life—of family and ministry and hard work—heading for heaven, and that’s why it wouldn’t ever have occurred to her to desire to remain forever 21. Such a desire, subtly or overtly manifest in the attempts of so many to look and act young, betrays a failure, laced perhaps with fear, to recognize this glorious truth: As God’s redeemed people, we know that here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come (Hebrews 13:14).

And so we live and work and struggle and laugh and cry and wear ourselves out and get wrinkles and turn gray- or white-headed—and by God’s grace pursue all his callings—with the vision of the eternal city ever before us. Then, in God’s good timing, we like Jean Belz are called into our Savior’s presence. And that’s where “forever” really gets going!

Praise God for the years he gives us! May he teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom (Psalm 90:12), eschewing the desire for perpetual youth and celebrating the blessing of the years he gives us and looking forward to resurrected bodies in the new heavens and the new earth.

O God, deliver us from ever wanting to be forever 21!

Neil Neilson is a Ruling Elder in the PCA. He is the President of Covenant College (PCA) in Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. This article first appeared in The President’s Blog at www.covenant.edu and is used with permission.