This article was originally written for Mockingbird. I think this is a remix of something Key Life’s Steve Brown once said, but the aged man who’s been in church longer than you’ve been alive isn’t necessarily holier than you; he’s just more tired. The fact that he no longer acts on impulses which drove him in his adolescence is due less to the “level of spirituality” he’s achieved and more to the fact that he just doesn’t have the energy anymore. I admit that that might be an overly cynical view of the church’s elderly saints, but that doesn’t negate the fact that we are terribly prone to assume that this thing called “sanctification” is some sort of spiritual