The End of Days

Scripture Reading: Psalm 145; Daniel 5-6; Revelation 2

I know your works, your love and faith and service and patient endurance, and that your latter works exceed the first.

I turned 65 this year. At some point that became the age of retirement. Retire before then and you were retiring early. Retiring after that age and the question people commonly ask is, “When are you going to retire.” Of course, everyone has an opinion about what you should do. Everyone knows someone who retired and died three days later. And their death most certainly was caused by their lack of purpose. Others will tell you get out while you can so you can enjoy life for a few years before you die.

The government has set me “Full Retirement Age” at 67. They did that once they figured out people are living longer and they were going to have to pay back some of that money they had been confiscating for years and borrowing from the “Social Security Trust Fund” so that someone could study the mating habits of fruit flies in Sub Saharan Africa.

I won’t lie to you and say the idea of retirement never crosses my mind. It does. And if it ever slips my mind all I have to do is look at the mail where I have a daily reminder of various Medicare plans to choose from. And when I think about it, my primary question is what am I going to do with myself.

I don’t have a good answer to that question yet. I’ve worked since I was 14. So I don’t think I’ll break the habit I formed over 50 years overnight. What I do know is that I want to finish life here well. I don’t want to go out quietly.

I want the Lord to be able to say that my later works exceeded the my first. So, that is what I am praying for and that is what I am aiming at. I don’t know what that will or should look like yet, except to say that I want leave the door open to heaven behind me when I walk through it. I want to join in the call that has echoed through the ages, the one that mirrors the call of the Spirit and the Church, “Come. Anyone who is thirsty come, and the one who desires to take the water of life without price, come.” (Revelation 22:17)

So be it, Lord.