You ask for prayer regarding the many concerns that attend your husband’s old age. This is a weighty season, yet it is precisely in such times that the soul can be most truly instructed. Do not let your heart be consumed with the outward decay, for while the body bends toward the earth, the spirit may be lifted to heaven. Seek first that your husband be found sober, grave, and temperate, sound in the faith and abounding in patience, for these are the adornments that please God, not the fleeting handsomeness of youth which age so swiftly tarnishes. If he clings to the lusts of younger years and remains intractable, let him not say the sins were of ignorance, for old age itself pleads guilty against the man who does not change. Yet even now, at the eleventh hour, it is possible to recover all, for the Master of the vineyard offers the full wage to those who turn with their whole heart.
And you, his wife, learn from the elder women what becomes holiness: be a teacher of good things by your own quiet and chaste behavior. Love your husband, but love God more than your husband. For if you set your affection supremely on the Immortal Protector, then even should widowhood come, you will not taste its bitterness, for He who is most beloved cannot be taken from you. Do not fret overmuch about the earthly covering of your body or seek to appear beautiful by outward array; that path leads only to shame and grief. The woman who fears the Lord keeps at home, is obedient to her own husband as the Church to Christ, and in silence possesses her soul with that godly fear which is her true ornament. No costly raiment can rescue from death, nor drive away disease, nor stay the advance of years; but the youth that knows no old age and the riches that endure are given to those who count all else as loss for the sake of Christ.
Therefore, for your husband who is full of days, pray that he may put away irritability, slowness, and every weight of age that becomes an excess of wickedness. Let him not be as one who raves through wine or sorrow, but as one whose mind is well-tempered and vigilant. And for yourself, cease to be riveted to the unstable things of this life. What would not the aged give to be young again? Yet God offers a youth immortal to those who despise the present trifles. Husband and wife, both together, stand bound by a lifelong covenant; but remember that even this holy bond is transitory, while the soul’s marriage to Christ is eternal. So then, let your daily prayer be that you both may run the race of old age not with complaining, but with the hope of the resurrection, knowing that while sin makes men shameless, the fear of God makes them bold only in well-doing.
Pray then, and I will pray with you, that the Lord who knows our frame and remembers that we are dust will grant this man a grave and sober spirit, purged from the follies of youth, and will give you, his wife, the meek and quiet spirit which in His sight is of great price. May you together be found faithful, not provoked to anger, not false accusers, but examples to the younger, that the word of God be not blasphemed. And when the time of the body’s dissolution draws near, may you both stand without terror, having loved not the world nor the things in the world, but Him who is the Resurrection and the Life. Amen.