RETIRE OR RETREAD?

When you reach that magic age, are you going to retire or just retread and keep on rolling?  I think retirement is the time when you stop going to work and start working to go. Working to go  on to new vistas, new challenges, new activities that are not controlled by the constants of time and untouched by the strangling tentacles of stress.

Someone has said, “Life begins at retirement”…I believe that. The question is, “What kind of life?”.. A life of trying to top your past achievements, or a life being satisfied with your past achievements?   I think retirement is a time when we have to accept our past and be willing to accept it for what it is.. “The Past!”  The only purpose for a Past is to provide experience, from which we draw, in order to create a new fulfilling present.  And don’t forget, today will be tomorrow’s past.

Even though my profession was that of an educator, all my life has been filled with photography.  Now that I have retired from the school business,  I find it fun to fill my new leisure time with creating photographic art.

 (https://dale-paul.pixels.com ) 

 And you know what? I still have time to loaf and rest without being plagued by guilt. 

I think it is true that when we retire we should just retread and get back on the road.  But a “road less traveled.”  A road that has a maximum speed limit of 25 MPH and a rest area every 25 miles.                        

J.  Lubbock has written: “Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.

Doug Larson has said: “If people concentrated on the really important things in life, there'd be a shortage of fishing poles.”

Hartman Jule writes: “Retirement has been a discovery of beauty for me. I never had the time before to notice the beauty of my grandkids, my wife, the tree outside my very own front door. And, the beauty of time itself.

Don’t you think this would be a great time of life to use some of our newly unencumbered time for personal ministry.  Maybe volunteering in order to “Do it unto the least of these,” and in doing so, know that we have done unto Christ Himself.

 Let’s not just retire….Let’s retread and fill our days with a mixture of labor, rest, fun, and ministry, with labor being the lesser of the four…….

Writing this just wore me out!   I have got to go take a nap…zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz