Don't Waste Your Retirement

John Piper wrote a great little book, Don’t Waste Your Life, (may be freely downloaded here) in which he recounts a retired couple’s decision to move onto yacht, and spend the rest of their lives beachcombing. Piper’s point was, after wasting their lives, what do they have to bring glory to God, seashells?

Piper writes:

I will tell you what a tragedy is. I will show you how to waste your life. Consider a story from the February 1998 edition of Reader’s Digest, which tells about a couple who “took early retirement from their jobs in the Northeast five years ago when he was 59 and she was 51. Now they live in Punta Gorda, Florida, where they cruise on their 30 foot trawler, play softball and collect shells.” At first, when I read it I thought it might be a joke. A spoof on the American Dream. But it wasn’t. Tragically, this was the dream: Come to the end of your life—your one and only precious, God-given life—and let the last great work of your life, before you give an account to your Creator, be this: playing softball and collecting shells. Picture them before Christ at the great day of judgment: “Look, Lord. See my shells.” That is a tragedy. And people today are spending billions of dollars to persuade you to embrace that tragic dream. Over against that, I put my protest: Don’t buy it. Don’t waste your life.

I believe one of the Christian church’s greatest capitulations to worldly thinking is the concept of retirement. Since social pension programmes were established for all workers, much of life has become a scramble to save enough money to survive retirement. When the age was set for workers to retire (usually males), sixty-five was just a few years short of the time they were expected to die. With better health care and worker safety, workers can reasonably expect to live another 20 years or more after they quit working. That is, twenty years without a paycheque. The quality of life depends upon the quality of savings during the working years. That those who have very demanding jobs physically and mentally (such as manual labourers and coffee shop servers) have the poorest retirement prospects, while many who had relatively easy work (this description left blank!) have the richest pensions, is a matter of injustice.

This, of course, is a great burden to the taxpayer, but that’s not my issue here. Much less is it my wish to see a neo-Marxist plan to solve these problems.

My concern is for those who have bought into the myth that the dominion mandate (i.e., to care for Creation, to do work; Genesis 1:28-31; 2:15) is suspended at an arbitrary age. If retirement means a quitting of labour, it is so as an act of disobedience from the God who made us to work. Christians should know better.

Many Christians are forced into leaving their places of employment by a certain age. But employment is not identical to godly work, and being out of the “workforce” does not place one on a twenty year vacation.

Work brings glory to God, and honours Him. I know of two excellent retirees (younger than me), whose industry offered them early retirement. It was a wise decision for them to take it, and indicates stewardship. Among the many other things they are doing now while “unemployed,” both serve their Lord by serving their community. More directly in service to Christ, one is undertaking hospital construction in Nigeria, the other is building and managing a church camp in Ontario. Here are two men, along with their wives, who live as examples of a retirement not wasted.

Bonhoeffer's Legacy

“Society’s view of a Forty-Year-Old Virgin is Steve Carrell. Christianity’s view of a forty-year-old virgin should be Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” –Trevin Wax

Not everything has to be seen through the same lens.  Review of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s new biography here.

A Fast Way to Fall in the Drink

dock - boat

It’s been said that “he who marries the spirit of the age soon finds himself a widower.” Good point. There are a lot of theological widowers, divorcees, and remarriages among the post-Christian Christendom lately. I can barely keep up.

I think of it another way: one of the fastest and surest ways to get wet is to step off the dock into an untethered boat.

Last year, the Presbyterian Church (USA) rejected a popular contemporary hymn because it included a line about the wrath of God. Can’t have a wrathful God! Whomever he/she/it/xe/xer/xem might be, that being(s) is/are not angry. Removing the idea of an angry God also paved the way, with smoothness and comfort, for the decisions made this year. The fearful prospect that God might not approve needn’t trouble the PCUSA, as their Deity is never upset about anything (except, of course, all things not Marxist or Green).

Having the fear of God out of the way, 2014 followed was a breeze. Not being known (at least in recent memory) of being overly concerned about Scripture’s word on most matters, the same church assembly voted to embrace and conduct same-sex marriages. Less covered in the news, but just as pitiful, is the denomination’s desire to “endorse Kermit Gosnell,” in its resolution to not assist children born alive after failed abortions. So all that stuff (murder and sodomy)  that brings judgement (recorded in the Bible) is no longer a big deal, since the Bible is not a big deal.

I could ask, “who are these people, who do they think they are?” but the answer is clear that it is the story of all shrinking mainline denominations, when they are commandeered (stolen, really) by theological liberals (to get a grasp of this phenomenon, read up on the life of J. Gresham Machen here). This was planted well over a hundred years ago, and is bearling bitter fruit in our generation. For his resistance, Machen was defrocked by the Presbyterians in 1935. His crime was that he was a believer. Read his seminal, Christianity and Liberalism (1926). It reads like a book written yesterday.

There is a race to the bottom, Biblically, theologically, spiritually, ethically, and politically among the mainline denominations and many evangelicals. But unbelief, and its assured consequences, faithlessness and apostasy, surely follow.

Like stepping into an untethered boat from a dock: push away from Scripture, and at the same time, reach toward an ever-changing spirit of the age, and you’re all wet.