Dust to Dust

Jen Wilkin, a Bible teacher in her mid-fifties, opens by posing a direct question: How does the reality of aging make you feel? The answer, she contends, depends on which story about aging a person has internalized. Since the fall recorded in Genesis 3, when Adam and Eve rejected God's narrative and chose one rooted in self-reliance, humanity has been susceptible to false stories in every area of life, including growing old.

Wilkin identifies the prevailing cultural attitude toward aging as a potent false story. This narrative values only the first half of life, treats bodily decline as something to prevent and deny, and regards the elderly as burdensome. She notes that the U.S. anti-aging industry was valued at more than 77 billion dollars in 2025. Against this, she sets the Bible's true story, in which aging is completion and the elderly are invaluable. A comparison chart spanning 10 dimensions illustrates the contrast: where the false story frames aging as diminishment, the true story frames it as a path toward deeper wisdom.

Wilkin offers a brief theology of time, arguing that aging existed before the fall, since the creation account establishes time-bound existence and implies developmental growth. What sin introduced was not aging but decline toward death. The soul, however, retains the capacity to grow throughout the entire lifespan. Wilkin distills this into a recurring refrain: "Bodies decline, people develop." Psalm 90:12, in which Moses asks God to teach us to number our days so that we may gain a heart of wisdom, serves as the book's guiding verse.

Wilkin then introduces her central organizing framework: the chiasm. A chiasm is a literary structure common in ancient Near Eastern writing that uses mirror-image parallelism and places its main emphasis at the midpoint rather than at the end. She maps human life onto this pattern, proposing nine stages: Birth, First Years, Adolescence, Early Adulthood, Midlife (the center), Late Midlife, Senior Adulthood, Final Years, and Death. Each stage in the first half mirrors a corresponding stage in the second half.

This framework grew out of personal experience. In January 2022, Wilkin witnessed her 80-year-old mother's death and was struck by the symmetry between her mother's final exhale and the labor and first inhale of birth eight decades earlier. Drawing on Job 1:21, she frames the first half of life as receiving and the second half as returning, with Job's response, "Blessed be the name of the LORD," as the posture believers are called to adopt.

The book's second part walks through each pair of the chiasm from the outer edges inward. The first pair is birth and death. Wilkin traces the biblical concept of breath, or ruach in Hebrew, connecting it to spirit and life. Breath distinguishes humans, who are made in God's image, from lifeless idols. She argues that modern culture has moved death out of sight, removing a formative practice from daily life. Citing Ecclesiastes 7:2, she contends that wisdom is found in greater supply through confronting death than through celebration alone. She calls on Christians to recover the practice of memento mori, or intentional remembrance of death, by volunteering for hospice, attending funerals, and treating care for the dying as essential.

The second pair is first years and final years. Wilkin compares the rapid gains of early childhood with corresponding losses in old age: Mobility aids replace first steps, soft foods replace solid ones, and failing eyesight replaces sharpening vision. Drawing on author David Brooks's distinction between résumé virtues, the marketplace skills people compete over, and eulogy virtues, the character qualities praised at funerals, Wilkin argues that character is built through confrontation with weakness. She cites Paul's thorn-in-the-flesh passage in 2 Corinthians 12:8–10 to contend that Christ's strength is made perfect in weakness. Wilkin examines the fifth commandment in its original context, explaining that ancient Israel's clan system understood it as a charge for adult children to provide for aging parents. She traces the historical shift to nuclear families and warns that the "graying of America," a projected demographic shift by 2035 to more Americans over 65 than under 18, will create an eldercare crisis for which churches must prepare.

The third pair is adolescence and senior adulthood. Wilkin maps adolescent milestones against corresponding losses in later life and notes that senior adulthood as a distinct stage is historically novel. Despite the Bible's acknowledgment of physical decline, Scripture regards long life as a blessing; Psalm 92:14–15 declares the righteous still bear fruit in old age. However, Wilkin warns that unrighteousness also intensifies, citing her stepmother's observation that "as we age, we become 'more so.'" Drawing on psychologist Laura Carstensen's research on socioemotional selectivity theory, she argues that as people perceive time as limited, they shift priorities from expanding horizons to pursuing relational depth and emotional meaning.

The fourth pair is early adulthood and late midlife, stages united by caregiving. Wilkin identifies parallels between raising children and caring for aging parents: Both involve financial complexity, career uncertainty, and renegotiated family relationships. She contrasts Western attitudes that treat eldercare as burdensome with the collectivist model described in physician Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, in which Gawande's grandfather in India lived past 100 in the care of extended family. She draws a sobering connection, noting that Canada's Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program accounted for roughly one in 20 Canadian deaths by 2024, with over a third of applicants citing feeling like a burden. From her own experience, Wilkin describes how her dread of eldercare gave way to unexpected richness.

The chapter on midlife occupies the center of the chiasm. Wilkin frames it as the season offering the clearest vantage point on the full arc of life. She critiques the anti-aging industry's targeting of middle-aged women and argues that its messaging tempts covetousness against one's own younger self. She connects this to postmodernism, a philosophy that centers truth on personal self-definition, and expressive individualism, a framework that treats inner feelings as the authoritative guide to identity. She warns that the logic justifying cosmetic age reversal extends to other forms of bodily alteration, while extending grace to those who pursued such interventions because the church was silent about the true story. Bodies, she argues, belong to God as temples of the Holy Spirit and exist primarily for service rather than decoration.

In the final chapter, Wilkin contrasts Google engineer Ray Kurzweil's prediction of human immortality by 2030 with the biblical teaching that death is divinely appointed. She describes the annual practice of Dr. Landrum Leavell III, who calculates how many days he has left until age 70 and shares the number with his congregation. She connects the Ash Wednesday liturgy, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return," to the biblical pattern of remembering mortality. She lists historical figures who died by what we would now consider middle age, including John Calvin at 54 and William Shakespeare at 52, and notes that modern people can expect thousands of additional days. She presents a personal wish list: seeking more time among the elderly, planning for eldercare, talking openly about decline, and practicing self-forgetfulness. The false story of anti-aging is fueled by fear and frames old age as irrelevance; the true story is rooted in joy and frames it as a journey into deeper wisdom. Believers can age without fear because, as Paul writes, those who have borne the image of the man of dust will also bear the image of the man of heaven.