Sherrylee and I attended a wonderful celebration yesterday for Dr. Ken Adams and his wife Lindy at Oklahoma Christian University. Ken is retiring after serving forty years as the choral director and as professor/mentor for literally thousands of students. About two hundred chorale alumni came from all over the country to participate in a final concert last Sunday in his honor. Hardeman Auditorium was packed—and profoundly moved by the beautiful music of Karl Jenkins’ The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace, written in 2000 for the Millennium celebration. If you appreciate classical music, let me strongly recommend you order a copy of this piece immediately!
One of my strongest thoughts as Ken masterfully directed the full orchestra and the two-hundred voice choir was why is he stopping now? This may have been one of his greatest performances, so he is not suffering from diminished capacities! He is not old! (Somewhere I read that Baby Boomers don’t think a person is old until they are around 78.) He is not ill! So why does one retire from doing what one still loves and can do so well?
According to the statistics that I just found, only 20% of Americans between 60-64 are still in the workforce. In the UK, it is only 10%, and these cousin nations rank far above most other industrialized countries. Austria, Belgium, France, and Italy have only 1% in that age bracket still employed, and Spain has ZERO per cent!
Spain is #8 in rankings for life expectancy (80.9 years) and the US is #36 (78.3). In fact, all of the above countries have a higher life expectancy than the U.S. But even without quibbling over a few months, on the average most of us have 15-20 years of life left after we retire!
Retirement, as a social policy, is just a little over a century old, so Jesus was never faced explicitly with this issue; however, those commissioned to take his words to the world did sometimes live longer.
I’m thinking about the Apostle Paul—most likely in his sixties–writing to Timothy and saying, “Well, I’ve been working now for over thirty years, so I’m thinking about retiring so I can do things that I’ve been wanting to do—travel, visit my relatives in Tarsus, just hang out with Peter’s grandchildren. I’m just tired of the constant pressure to produce, the hassle from the brethren, even just the burden to write all these letters. No, I’m just ready to call my own shots –while I’m still healthy and can enjoy life.”
What’s wrong with this picture?
Our confusion regarding retirement, I’m convinced, occurs when we confuse retirement from employment with retirement from our life, our passion, our purpose, our commitment, yes, retirement from our faith and from faithfulness.
If Jesus had been a carpenter for thirty or forty years, he might have stopped at some point in life, but, whether he was 30, 60, or 90 years old, He would have never stopped being the Son of God. He was the one who said, “As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work” (John 9:4).
Paul might have closed his tent-making company down at some point in his later years, but he would never stop going to the synagogues to speak on Saturday or down to the river where the prayer group was meeting, searching for Seekers.
And Ken and Lindy will always be great servants. They won’t stop being who they have been because of retirement. If anything, they will likely find even better ways to serve God and those around them.
I want to retire someday too—but what I really, really want is to write as my last words what in his last days Paul wrote to Timothy: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”
Jesus might have retired—but He would never have quit!
Mark's Blog 