If you've been a follower of Jesus Christ for any length of time, you've no doubt heard this question time and time again: "If this God of yours is so good, why does He allow all this suffering?"

There are many answers to this question -- but my favorite is that suffering can lead to eternal joy. 

I experienced this phenomenon myself, first hand: It was 14 years ago today that the Lord called my 87-year-old Christian mother home to heaven, leaving me, a committed atheist, utterly heartbroken -- and desperate to know if she'd been right after all, if she might still exist somewhere, and if so, how I could get there, too. 

It was my intense grief that forced me to consider what Jesus Christ called, in Matthew 7, the narrow gate to life. And it was that same grief that propelled me through 15 months of fierce investigation, until I could at last bow my heart to Him with complete confidence that He is indeed God and did indeed die to pay the penalty for my sins and yours. 

Stories like mine underscore one of the primary reasons that our Creator allows pain and suffering in this world: It's the only way He can get some of us to consider the narrow gate to life (Matthew 7:13-14).

Sometimes this suffering afflicts atheists and agnostics only indirectly, with the actual pain being borne by their beloved believers. 

Many of the friends I have called on at the nursing home over the years, for example, have suffered relentless pain -- yet their faith has remained steadfast for all to see. Could such circumstances be designed to draw their dear unbelievers through the narrow gate to their sides?

I certainly can't know, and the Bible does alert us to many other purposes for affliction. But I have seen this particular scenario play out more than once, with the lost being gloriously saved as they watched their loved ones find supernatural solace in the Lord.

I guarantee that, for these elderly believers, it's worth any price to see family and friends become heaven-bound -- even when that price is profound suffering in this life.

For they know, as the apostle Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 4, that "Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal." 

A topic of conversation that never gets old with the elderly is what it was like in the good ol' days. The decade will vary with the individual -- some remember the Great Depression with Waltons-esque fondness, whereas others prefer to think back on the family-friendly, Leave It To Beaver 1950s. 

One of the wonderful things about this latter era was the corner store. It was a little like the quick-stop stores co-located with gas stations today, except that corner-store clerks were the owners themselves, the cash registers jingled, and the prices were far more reasonable, relatively speaking; a loaf of bread was no more expensive here than it was at the big Red Owl or Piggly Wiggly store a mile or more away, and a busy mom could send her child dashing over there to pick up a pound of sugar or a dozen eggs or anything else she'd run out of in the midst of baking a cake or fixing dinner.

Shown above is the corner store I grew up with, in Green Bay, Wis.; our house was on the other side of the same city block. Now on the market for $149,900, it has apparently been used to run a catering business in recent years. I don't suppose a little grocery store could make it these days, what with soaring property taxes and unrelenting price-competition from the giants, all just minutes away for today's two-car families. 

But the memories of these tiny gems of American free enterprise still remain in the hearts of our elderly and almost-elderly. For a lively peek into the past, ask your favorite senior citizen about the corner stores they remember most fondly. 

When I was a kid growing up in small-town Green Bay, Wisconsin, the Odd Fellows Home was the only long-term care (LTC) facility around. We did know one woman who spent her final months there, a widowed friend of my mom’s named Sadie who’d spent her adult life cleaning other people’s houses and taking care of other people’s children.  But she was the only one; all the other old people we knew lived with their children and grandchildren.  

That’s just the way it was: families took care of their own in those days. But that was then and this is now, and somewhere along the line everything changed.

Today, the elderly are little more than a liability to many of today’s young people – perhaps most. Even when we’re talking about our own old age, we see ourselves as little more than potential millstones: I don’t want to be a burden to my children, we say. They have their lives to live, after all. Oh, sure, when I was able to help out with babysitting or cooking, that was one thing, but now I’d just be in the way.

So what happened?

You don’t have to be Hercules Poirot to figure it out. Clearly, the rebellion-crazed, lust-filled, pleasure-seeking hippy generation that came of age in the ‘60s changed the heart of this nation.

We thought we knew everything, we baby boomers. Most important, we knew not to trust anyone over 30. After all, older folks just wanted to ruin our good time. Their greed had landed themselves in joyless gray existences in which men were slaves to capitalist corruption and women were slaves to men. And they were all jealous of us; they wanted us to be as miserable as they really were, beneath those facades of contentment and purpose.

But that's a secular assessment. I think something much more insidious and evil took root in the ‘60s. I think that was when Satan himself finally succeeded in trashing the 5th commandment: Honor your father and your mother.

It’s the first of the commandments governing our relationships with each other rather than God, and may therefore be the most important of all. And yet for some reason, my generation decided to jettison it.

Honor our fathers and mothers? You’ve got to be kidding! We won’t even trust anyone over 30, let alone honor them!

Hear the hiss?

Way too many of us bought it, hook, line and sinker, and our parents paid the price. And soon enough we will, too.

One of the many ironies is that we felt guilty about what we had done – after all, God has written His law on our hearts, so that deep down we knew it was wrong to turn our backs on the elderly. We felt so guilty, in fact, that we put into power people who delight in slapping useless regulations on the facilities we put our parents in. And those regulations are so costly that they’ve caused a cascade of financial problems that will ultimately threaten the very existence of even the finest LTC facilities.

Fortunately, it’s not too late for many of us. We can choose to take our parents into our own homes as they become unable to care for themselves. Or, if that’s impossible, we can do whatever it takes to find the very best facilities, where their bodies, minds and spirits will receive even more attention than we could possibly give them. And we can then make spending time with them a top priority in our lives.

We can’t turn the clock back to the 1950s. But we can at least live as if the last half century never happened. 

"Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world." (James 1:27)

Could the need possibly have been as desperate 2000 years ago, when James wrote those words? It's hard to imagine. Consider just a few of the statistics highlighted in the Evangelism Explosion Seniors' workbook:

• More than 50 million Americans are likely to spend their last days in some type of extended-care facility
• 75% will be women
• 60% will never have a visitor

There are many forms of torment in this world, but surely the top ten list would have to include the years of loneliness suffered by the fragile elderly whose only companionship comes from people who are being paid to walk through their doors.

The good news is that we don't have to travel farther than the nearest nursing home to help alleviate this loneliness for at least a few -- and to share with them the great Good News of the Lord's love for each of them. 

It costs nothing but time. There are no special requirements other than a loving heart and a willingness to serve the One who died for you. And once you've asked Him to order your steps, all it takes to get started is a call to the Activities Director of the home that seems to be the one He is calling you to.

You'll find the rewards phenomenal even in this life. But that's nothing compared to what you might gain for all eternity. 

"Then the King will say to those on His right hand, 'Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.' ... 'Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.'  (Matthew 25:34-36, 40b)

One of the joys of befriending elderly Americans is discovering what the world used to be like, in those saner years before we Baby Boomers started turning everything inside out and backwards. These are mostly men and women who were themselves raised in Christian homes, with a belief in the resurrection of Jesus, the divine origins of the Bible and the existence of absolute truth. Even if they themselves rebelled against the authorities in their lives, most of them seem to believe in God, in good and evil and in the critical importance of living a moral life, as a prelude to some sort of final judgment.

Over the last 14 years, while drawing close to so many of these lovely people, I’ve also had the pleasure of reading some of the literature they grew up with, or raised their own children on. And one of my favorite discoveries has actually been a rediscovery of a series I was exposed to as a child. 

I came across this series a couple years ago through a wonderful Colorado bookseller I met through when we were both doing some writing for a Christian ministry.  Her name is Karen and she has a terrific ebay store called Karen's Living Books; it features rare and out-of-print children’s books.  

For years, I’d been haunted by the memory of a Bible-based story about a young brother and sister who befriended an elderly neighbor who had, until their gracious overture, frightened them. I asked Karen if it rang any bells with her, and it did not -- at least, not immediately. But months later, while on a walk, she had a brainstorm; could I be remembering Uncle Arthur's Bedtime Stories? She just happened to have one volume in stock, and sent it to me. 

Bingo! My long-remembered story was not in this particular volume, but everything about this little book told me that indeed Karen had hit on it – the illustrations were right, each story came complete with a biblical moral, and even the tone was exactly what I had so vaguely remembered.  

I devoured the copy Karen sent me and have done the same with several others that I've found since then -- in the process, time-traveling to my own innocent and very happy childhood and finding there hope for a joyful forever. (I'm personally of the belief that the Lord gives us moments of joy in this life to point us to the endless joy of His eternal kingdom.)

And there was to be a bonus as well: I stumbled across a series of youtube videos in which charming twin sisters take turns reading these stories for the camera. Alas, Mary and Molly are all grown up and off to college now, so I guess there won't be any more Uncle Arthur stories from them; but what hope it gives me to know that there are still children being raised in this country with such a love of the living God. 

My elderly friends' world is still alive and well, at least in some neighborhoods. And thanks to authors like Uncle Arthur, we can all step back into it whenever we please.