Working Toward Retirement!?

Lately I have been thinking more about retirement, probably because I am rapidly nearing a certain age which I do not even want to mention. But it seems that talk about retirement is everywhere these days, so it is hard not to think about it; and it also seems to me that retirement is the new American God, the new American dream, perhaps not even that new anymore.

I used to think of retirement in two different ways. The first was the traditiional understanding of retirement as rest from work, or rest from having to work, after having saved up enough money to do so--a time, hopefully a lengthy time with good health--of waking up in the morning without a schedule and the opportunity to do whatever, or go wherever, or not, whenever one wanted to. Gosh, that sounds nice just thinking about it! It is the kind of reitement my parents enjoy.

The second way I have thought about retirement is in the sense of getting a-new-set-of-tires--you know, a re-tiring, for the next stage of one's life journey. You wear out one set of tires and it comes time to get another, so that you can go as fast, or faster, than you were going before. I have heard many retired pastors announce at their retirements that they were not really retiring--they were re-tiring: getting a new set of tires so that they could continue to grace, or plague, the church, whatever the case might be.

Lately though, a third way of understanding retirement has occured to me: retirement as getting-tired-all-over-again; and who wants to do that? But that is what both of the above kind of retirememts often seem to end up being. The outer circumstances of life may change, but the inner ways of living that made us tired in life the first time around still seem to be in place, and we re-tire; we get tired all over again. As I think about it, I do not want to work toward retirement; I want to work toward untirement--to be untired, not retired.

The life of faith is a course in untirement. When Saul met Jesus on the road to Damascus, he did not retire from being a Pharisee; he untired, and lived the rest of his life in untirement, no matter the degree to which he spent himself physically, emotionally, spiritually. Perhaps we need to be offering a course in unitrement?

Randy