Author Havumaki has devoted his Christian career to service for seniors. Needing employment in 1978 and with a background in ministry, he took on the full-time role of chaplain in four facilities for seniors, becoming immersed in that responsibility and the strong spiritual principles that underpinned it. He reminds readers that humans were created out of dust, and will return to dust, yet their restoration in spirit exists through the life and sacrifice of God's son, Jesus. As one ages, the author states, one will have an increasing impulse to seek the glory of the afterlife, with that process beginning in middle age. A useful chart is offered illustrating the crux of physical and spiritual change at age seventy. This model, Havumaki explains, is based on scripture. In another lively example, the phases of life begin and end as "Milk" with steak, French-fries, caviar, and champagne noted as stages in between.

The author's concern throughout this thought-provoking work is that our society generally dismisses the needs of elders, targeting the urge to get rid of wrinkles as a case in point. Yet he questions, "How beautiful does one have to look to meet Jesus?" His basic tenets stress that we should treat our elders respectfully and religiously, as churchgoers and as a nation. With years of personal and professional immersion in the well-considered principles he sets forth, Havumaki offers a plethora of memorable case studies, some brief, as in small life-changing incidents arising in the settings for the aging of which he is chaplain, and some lengthy, including his lively, intelligent explications of biblical truth as a consistent basis. It is his wish that readers will take his message to heart and begin to plan for their own aging process, with an eye always to finishing well and encouraging that goal in others.

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