RETIREMENT - ONE YEAR LATER

A year ago now I wrote a blog about the difficulty I was having anticipating Jim’s retirement.  Although it seems ridiculous now, it was no joke a year ago.  All I could think about, completely selfishly, was the impact it was going to have on ME!  

Here’s how my mind went:

·        Jim will want to spend all his time with me.  What about seeing my friends?

·        We’ll be down to one car and I’ll never go anywhere alone again.

·        I’ll have to give up my freedom to minister wherever and with whomever the Lord directs me.

·        We’ll have to pinch pennies.

·        He’ll be underfoot every day and I’ll lose my independence at home.

I’m embarrassed now to read all those self centered things!  I’m embarrassed that I thought so little about Jim’s adjustment and so much about my own!  How completely and utterly selfish!

I should have remembered back then one of my own Dot-isms:  95% of the things we worry about never come to pass!

·        Jim’s late nights at work never were caused by car accidents, although I ALWAYS worried that they were.

·        The test results never were cancer (except once), although I’d lose sleep over EVERY test, always imagining the worst.

·        The job interview, or the yearly review, was always better than I thought it would be, although I never thought that would be the outcome.

So why did I think that retirement would be so confining?  Habit, I guess.  One that’s way past needing to be replaced with TRUST.

Jim is a great guy and a great husband.  Spending more time with him has been one of the BEST perks of his retirement.  We have lunch together, we go to the gym together (if he didn’t go I’d NEVER go, so this is GOOD), we have regular Tuesday date nights because now he’s never home late!  

We share our car, but I’m the one using it most.  I still have complete independence, just the way I always did when we had two cars.  We do go more places together but it's actually fun!

Jim has found plenty to do.  He does some consulting in accounting, he is our church treasurer, he does taxes.  He’s free to say yes to serving in the kitchen for the church’s senior luncheon, for painting the hall ways at church, and for helping to install new cabinets in the kitchen there.  We don't always do things together.

Now we can stop for lunch when we’re out on an errand, go to a movie in the afternoon, go on a trip overnight in the middle of the week, spend a week in Florida in FEBRUARY!  I love this retirement thing!

And instead of having to “give up” ministry, the Lord has expanded ministry horizons for me to include teens, and that keeps me thinking young!  

I wish I could say, when it comes to worrying about the future, “I’ll never do THAT again!”, but knowing me, I’ll forget all about that Dot-ism, and have to learn the hard way that while the future will mean change – the change doesn’t have to be BAD.

It can turn out to be exciting, interesting and always new!

YOU SHALL HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME

I love my life!  It’s joyous and satisfying, and I sometimes have to pinch myself that I get to live it!  

Each week I get to lead middle schoolers through a passage of the Bible and then step back and observe while they learn to think biblically and apply God’s Word to their everyday lives.  Now and then they also share how what we learned impacted them in a given week.  It’s awesome to watch the Lord at work in them!

For 12 weeks this fall and winter I studied faith lessons from the life of Abraham in the book of Genesis and listened as women volunteered answers and shared what they were learning as we looked into a passage together.  Sometimes they told me later what impact a lesson had on their marriage, or in their walk with the Lord.  How exciting!

I get to catch a glimpse of what the Lord is doing in the lives of numbers of women of all ages as the Lord grows them into the godly wives, and mothers, and young adults He sees them to be, and I think:  life just doesn't get any better than this!

I’ve noticed something recently however.  I’ve noticed that sometimes ministry gets in the way of my own relationship with the Lord.  I find that I get too busy to pursue Him, too busy to spend much time in prayer, too busy studying in preparation to teach others, so that in the end, I have no time to spend listening to what the Lord wants to say to ME.  

It makes me wonder, have I been settling for the good (and it has been better than just good, it has been GREAT), and missing the Lord’s best?

I don’t think for a moment that all of these wonderful opportunities to teach and to serve are things from which the Lord would have me turn away.  No, I think He is the One doing the leading, the One guiding me into these opportunities.  But I think He just might be reminding me that I need to be very careful not to let the gifts become more valuable and precious than the giver.

In “My Utmost for His Highest”, for February 6^th, Oswald Chambers referred to Abraham’s near sacrifice of his long awaited son, Isaac.  Abraham had been given wonderful promises by God which were for him and his descendants.  The only problem was that at 75 years of age, Abraham didn’t have any descendants.  The Lord promised him that he would indeed have a son and the promised son finally came, miraculously, 25 years later when Abraham was described as: “as good as dead”.  

Since the Lord had promised Abraham that it was through Isaac that all the promises to him would be fulfilled, it undoubtedly came as a complete surprise when God asked Abraham to sacrifice that very son as an offering.

We’re told in the New Testament book of Hebrews, in chapter 11, that Abraham went ahead with the plan to sacrifice his son, reasoning that if the Lord had given him this son, and all of the promises made to him were to come through Isaac, and now the Lord was asking him to sacrifice that son – then the Lord intended to raise Isaac from the dead.  At the very last moment, God stayed his hand and provided a substitute for Abraham's beloved son (foreshadowing God's own sacrifice of His Beloved Son, Jesus, who would die and be resurrected). 

Chambers applies this to his readers in the here and now when he says:

“Are you ready to be poured out as an offering (the way Isaac was)?  It is an act of your will, not your emotions. . . . . You must be willing to be placed on the altar and go through the fire; willing to experience what the altar represents – burning, purification, and separation for only one purpose – the elimination of every desire and affection not grounded in or directed toward God. . . . Tell God you are ready to be poured out as an offering, and God will prove Himself to be all you ever dreamed He would be.”

For some reason, reading that made me wonder whether my joyous and satisfying life is centered more in “affection not grounded in or directed toward God”.  

Has doing ministry been displacing God from His rightful place in my heart?  

That question comes again to the forefront of my mind:  If everything were stripped away, and I had only the Lord, would HE be enough?  if tomorrow my health should fail, or my life circumstances change - and all I know and love were stripped away -

would my life be as satisfying and joyful as it is now?  Would knowing the Lord and fellowshipping with Him - with nothing else to occupy me - be enough?  

Where does my joy and satisfaction rest - in ministry or in the Lord Himself?

I can tell you I’ll be thinking and praying about this for a while, giving over my other affections, so that nothing gets in the way of God proving "Himself to be all I've ever dreamed He would be."