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I am about to experience something of biblical proportions. It's nothing to do with floods; it's about numbers. Within 24 hours I will be three score years and ten. I will be one of the 'ageing population'. But I always have been. Any baby born a minute ago will currently be ageing at the same rate as her great granny. But what does it mean to be in the upper age ranks? I've been looking for possible mentors, models of seniority, and have narrowed it down to two. The first is Saul, the king of ancient Israel who, from the moment that the boy David slew the giant Goliath, regarded him as a threat. Saul saw the younger and abler David as a challenge to his power and so he tried to silence him. We see the same kind of thing when senior politicians and commentators try to belittle the passion and determination in teenagers like Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai. But it happens at more mundane levels. A few years ago I met, in California, a female pastor of a very wealthy congregation. She told me how several weeks previously four senior men had taken her aside, suggested politely that her face didn't fit and offered her a substantial sum of money to leave. 'Were they retired business men, by any chance?' I asked. “Every one of them”, she replied. No longer being the boss, they experienced a vacuum of power. So they compensated for it by transferring their need to be in charge from their previous occupation to their role in a voluntary organisation. They also probably had never been accountable to someone younger than themselves. For some older people, letting go of the reins, allowing someone else to take their place, or even deciding that it's time to stop driving, is not easy. But I'm also looking at another mentor. Her name is Elizabeth. She appears early on in the Christian story, but little is known about her. She has no prestige or pedigree. But in her senior years she discovers that she is expecting a baby. This is her new vocation. And awkward and unsettling as that might be at her age, she devotes time and energy to take under her wing and support an unmarried teenage girl called Mary who is pregnant with a child who will be known as Jesus. Elizabeth does not fear growing older, she celebrates it. She doesn't become self-pitying or self-obsessed. Rather she provides encouragement to someone much younger than herself. I admire Elizabeth, and I thank God that we don't all need to become pregnant to be as enabling and encouraging in our senior years.