My preconceptions about older people first began to crumble when one of my congregants, a woman in her 80s, came into my office seeking pastoral care. She had been widowed for several years but the reason for her distress was not the loss of her husband. It was her falling in love with a married man. As she shared her story with me over a cup of tea and Kleenex, I tried to keep a professional and compassionate countenance, though, internally, I was bewildered by the realization that even into their 80s, people still fall for one another in that teenage, butterflies-in-the-stomach kind of way.

我对老年人的固有观念开始动摇，是因为我教堂里的一位 80 多岁的女信徒曾来找我寻求牧师的帮助。她已经守寡好几年了，但让她烦恼的并不是失去丈夫的痛苦，而是她爱上了一个已婚男人。她在我办公室里，一边喝茶一边用纸巾擦泪，向我倾诉她的故事。虽然我努力保持专业和同情的态度，但内心却被一个现实冲击了——即便人到八十多岁，依然会像青春期那样，心跳加速地爱上他人。

One of the strange and wonderful features of my job as a minister is that I get to be a confidant and advisor to people at all stages of life. I’ve worked with people who are double and even triple my age. Experience like this is rare; our economic structure and workforce are stratified, and most people are employed within their own demographics. But because I’m a minister in a mainline denomination with an aging base, the people I primarily interact with are over the age of 60. I came into my job assuming that I, a Korean-American woman in my mid-30s, would not be able to connect with these people — they’re from a completely different racial and cultural background than me. It did not take long for me to discover how very wrong I was.

作为一名牧师，我的工作有一个奇特而美妙的特点，那就是我能够成为各个年龄段人们的知己和顾问。我曾与年龄是我两倍甚至三倍的长者共事。这样的经历并不常见，因为我们的经济结构和工作场所常常是分层的，大多数人都在与自己同龄人中工作。但由于我服务的教派主要信徒群体已有一定的年龄，因此我通常接触的是 60 岁以上的人。我起初认为，作为一名 30 多岁的韩裔美国女性，我可能无法与这些来自完全不同种族和文化背景的人产生共鸣。然而，实际上我很快发现自己完全错了。