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!