I turned sixty this month.
And here is something I did not always expect to be able to say. I love my life more now than I ever have.
I think it is because I love the Lord more than I used to. That has been the quiet secret of growing older, at least for me. The closer I draw to Him, the bigger the truly important things become and the smaller everything else gets. The worries shrink. The love grows. What actually matters comes into focus in a way it never did when I was young and striving and trying to prove myself.
So sixty does not feel like something to brace against. It feels like a gift. One more year of watching God be faithful. One more year of the things that last mattering more than the things that fade.
I thought my birthday would be a quiet day. I am not someone who needs a big fuss, so when Bill told me we were going out for a simple dinner, I believed him.
I should have known better.
The gift I never saw coming
Because when we walked in, there they were. Linzey and Nate. My daughter and her husband, who I thought were still back in Sacramento, standing right in front of me with the biggest smiles.
And they were not the only surprise. My brother and his family were there too, my only sibling, the one who has known me the longest of anyone alive. The whole table was full of the faces I love most, gathered in one place, just for me.
I did not have words. I just cried and held on.
I found out later that my husband Bill and our son Will had planned the whole evening together. The two of them, quietly scheming behind my back for weeks, pulling every string to gather my people in one room. It undoes me a little even now, knowing they went to all that trouble just to see my face light up.
They had chosen a restaurant with the whole Phoenix skyline stretched out in front of us. And if you know me even a little, you know that is not a small detail.
Let me tell you why the view matters so much to me. Quality time is my love language. It is how I feel loved and it is how I love the people who are mine. And when you set that quality time in front of God’s beauty, a sky turning gold over a city full of light, something in me lifts right off the ground. I can only call it euphoria.
Seeing His beauty while I share a meal gives me more joy than anything I could ever own. No gift with a price tag has ever come close. So a table full of my closest loved ones, with a skyline handed to me like a present, that alone would have been more than enough.
Then came the gifts.
I opened each one slowly, the way you do when you are trying to make a good night last. And then I reached the final one.
Inside was a photo. Small, grainy, black and white. A sonogram.
Our first grandchild.
Will and Taylor, our son and our daughter in love, were giving us the news in the quietest, most beautiful way. There was a heartbeat on that page. A tiny person already forming. Already known.
I am going to be a Lola.
Lola is our word for grandmother in Tagalog, the native tongue of the Philippines, the country I was born in. Saying it quietly over myself felt like something coming full circle. Lola. That is me now.
I have cried a lot of different kinds of tears in sixty years. These were a brand new kind.
• • •
The science of a grandmother’s love
I have been thinking about that little sonogram ever since. About what it means that I get to be a Lola now.
There is real science to this closeness, you know, and part of it is written right into our bodies. My grandchild carries my DNA, passed down through my own children. My children are half of me, and this baby is made from a piece of them, which means a piece of me is quietly living on in a brand new person. In the most literal way, that little one is an extension of the ones who came before. Blood of my blood, carried forward.
But it is more than biology. Researchers at Emory University ran the first study of its kind, scanning grandmothers’ brains while they looked at photos of their grandchildren. And do you know what lit up? The parts of the brain tied to emotional empathy.
The lead researcher described it so tenderly. When a grandchild smiles, the grandmother feels the child’s joy. When the grandchild cries, she feels the child’s pain. We are wired to feel with them, to be moved by them, to ache and delight right alongside them.
And there is something only the years can give you. By the time you become a grandparent, you have lived enough to know what is truly precious. You are not in the exhausting middle of it the way you were with your own babies. You get to slow down. You get to simply delight. You love with your whole heart and a little less fear.
I sat with all of that and thought, of course. God does not do anything by accident.
• • •
What God intended all along
Because the science is only pointing at something older and deeper.
Long before there were brain scans, there was a God who looked at that same kind of tiny forming life and knew every part of it. He says it so plainly.
“You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb.” Psalm 139:13
That baby on the sonogram is already fully known by God. Already loved. Already written about in His book before a single day has happened.
And Scripture does not treat grandchildren as a sweet little bonus. It calls them a crown. Grandchildren are the crowning glory of the aged. A crown. That is the word God chose.
Here is what I keep coming back to. God could have made us as people who each stood alone. Instead He made family. Scripture even says that God places the lonely in families and I have felt the truth of that in my own life. He takes people who feel like they belong nowhere and He gives them somewhere to belong, someone to call theirs. He built us for one another, generation after generation, blood and love wrapped together.
He told His people over and over to pass the story down. To tell their children and their grandchildren what He had done. Faith was never meant to stop with one person. It was meant to flow, hand to hand, down the line.
That is why this sonogram undid me. It is not just a baby. It is a whole new chapter of belonging. A new little person to love, to pray for, to one day tell about Jesus.
• • •
What really lasts
Think about what sat at that table. God’s beauty spread out in front of me, the view that always makes my heart soar. A meal shared with the people closest to me, my children, my brother and his family, everyone I love gathered in. And then the news that I am going to be a Lola.
Put those three things together and I can tell you plainly, it was the best present I have ever been given. Nothing wrapped in paper could come close.
Because sixty years has taught me something. Almost none of the things I once worried about ended up mattering.
Not the size of the house. Not whether I looked impressive. Not the hundred quiet comparisons I carried around for years.
What has lasted is people. The ones I love. The ones who flew in from Sacramento. The brother who has walked my whole life beside me. The little heartbeat that now shows up on a page.
And underneath all of it, holding all of it, my relationship with the Lord. That is the thread running through every good thing on that birthday table.
I did not grow up with much stability. I moved from place to place as a girl and belonging was something I had to learn slowly, later, with a lot of help and even more grace. So when I sit with a sonogram of my grandchild in a city full of light, I feel something I can only call restoration. The Lord has a way of giving back the years, of turning what once felt scarce into something that overflows.
There is one more thing that makes this so tender for me. My own mother never got to see her grandchildren. She was gone before she could hold my children, before she could ever be called their Lola.
So becoming a Lola myself carries a weight I can barely put into words. I get to receive the very gift she never did. And somehow, loving this new little one feels like honoring her too, like a grace being poured out on her behalf as much as mine. What was lost in one generation is being given back in another.
That is the God I have come to know. Not the fearful one I was handed as a child. The generous one who fills a birthday table until it spills over.
In the end, that is what remains. Him, and the people He gave us to love. Everything else is just the view. And believe me, I love a good view. But even the Phoenix skyline goes dark eventually. The love does not.
• • •
A few things to sit with
1. What is something you once thought mattered so much, that looking back turned out not to? What has actually lasted?
2. Where do you see God’s fingerprints in the people He has placed around you, across the generations?
3. If you sat quietly with your own story tonight, where might God be gently restoring years you thought were lost?
• • •
If reading this stirred something in you, a longing to heal, to feel known, to believe you are more loved than you ever realized, please know you do not have to sort through it alone.
The Purple Room is a free, quiet place to begin. No cost, no fixing, just an open door and someone to sit with you. You can find a session that fits your life at SoulCareJourney.org.
And when you are ready to go a little deeper, EvenBetter.app is there for the next step, whenever that time comes.
No pressure. Just an open door.
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