Off the Agenda: Conversations for Building Church Leaders

Almost immediately, I also began to say a certain prayer. It went something like, "Lord, please help me to use my gifts and talents to their highest and best use." I'm not sure, as a brand-spanking new believer in Jesus, that I actually thought my prayer would be heard. And if it were heard, I wasn't sure I'd know how to respond to what might come next. But in time, after having written and spoken a bit about the convergence of faith in my life and work, I was invited to speak at a little college in Indiana. You know, I was just supposed to come tell the students about what I did for a living and how Jesus had changed my life, even if not my job. So I went out there and did that. And then I went home to Boston.

But the president of that college in Indiana called me up a few months later and wondered if I might want to come teach business and economics. Can't say that I do, I thought. But then I remembered that prayer I'd been muttering over and over again, the one about wanting my "gifts and talents" used to their highest and best. And not long after that, I felt a kind of divine tug, if you know what I mean, to come and see. See if this was right for me, if this was a way I might use my gifts and talents, given to me by God, in a higher and a better way.

It was my time to think about doing something else. I wasn't thinking at all about retirement. I didn't sense I had to make a move, either. No, not at all. It was just something offered to me to try, to do my best. But I sensed I had been given the gifts and experience that, with God's grace, might make it work.

That was fifteen years ago. Since then my new life has been filled with many challenges and adjustments, joys and disappointments. I was terrified we'd run out of money. But that just never materialized. Yet just months after arriving in Indiana, my wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer. It was a great blow, but thankfully she's still alive today. Then she needed a heart transplant. Mercifully, she got that too, and continues to do pretty well, giving a lot of her time to hospice work.

Life is not easy. Whether you live in a big city or a small town, great challenges will threaten you. Count on it.

But the choice we made to come to Indiana, take a large pay cut, and teach have been, I think, worthy of the time and life God has given me. My family feels so, too. Now as I approach 60, I'm not all that far from retirement myself. I'll probably keep teaching as long as I have the strength and health, because I think I feel God's pleasure in teaching the next generation. I may have to cut back, but I don't need to know that just yet. For now, I'm just grateful to have the time and skills to do what I think is important and helpful in this very broken world.

Soon - or maybe even now - it will be YOUR time to choose, to choose what you will do next. Maybe your choices will be more limited than mine; for sure, you will have different ones set before you. However, one thing is for sure: you won't get your time back; you won't get to live it twice. And as you enter into or are now living through your retirement, you're also becoming something else, either something good or something less than what you might have hoped.

What are you tending to become? What is it that you want these summary years of your life to stand for and to say to those who will live on after you?

Funny, isn't it? In life or in retirement, oftentimes the more we focus on ourselves, the more we find we're bored or we're missing something or we've got aches and pains. On the other hand, the more we choose to focus on others and try to help them with their needs - be they grandchildren or a neighbor or needy people overseas - the more we tend to find, surprisingly enough, our own needs met.

And in the process, we become more generous, gracious, and fulfilled people.