If you have spent any time with either Betty or me in the past few months, you know that Betty is retiring in exactly twenty-nine days – but who’s counting. Betty is retiring early, and that decision has grown out of a several month conversation about how to live missionally at this stage of our lives. (By early, I mean that she is not 65 for a few years yet.)
She has taught at Gregory Lincoln Education Center (GLEC) for fourteen years and has enough cumulative years in the system to retire. At GLEC she’s been teacher of the year three times. After the third time she asked them not to put her on the list of nominees any more so that others could experience that affirmation. She is well-known and highly respected by the administration, by her peers, and by families who live in Houston’s Fourth Ward (the community primarily served by the school).
Can you tell how proud I am of her. In case you missed that, I am SO proud of the kind of human being she is! Her life inspires me.
Even though she is retiring, she is not leaving the school. Several years ago as a result of her work in the Faithwalking community, she gave her word to be an agent of God’s transforming love in that community. Retirement doesn’t change that. She has worked out an arrangement with her principal in which she will serve as the volunteer coordinator of volunteers. The hours will be less strenuous, and she will be able to travel some with me, but she is still deeply committed to the school.
Retirement conversations have caused us to think again about our shared values. We live in a culture that holds up a set of expectations about retirement that we don’t share, but the power of those cultural expectations causes us to be continually re-imagining our lives based on our values.
Obviously questions about money have arisen. So much of our lives, we have been influenced by a culture that tells us that the correct way to think about money and retirement is to ask and answer the question, “How do I sustain my standard of living over the 10 or 20 or 30 years once I quit drawing a regular paycheck?” The standard of living is the organizing factor in that conversation.
Betty and I have a long and complicated relationship with money. In fact of all the things that couples struggle with – communication, sex, in-laws, kids, vocations – money was the most challenging one for us to work out. We were well into our forties before the two individual stories about money that we brought to marriage got forged into one workable narrative. So, it was no small feat that we have been able to come to some shared decisions about retirement around the topic of money.
There are four things that we are really clear about
First, we are not seeking to maintain a standard of living. We have intentionally not put aside money to pursue that goal. We have things – house, car, time, influence – and we try to use those things for the sake of the common good. We don’t want our things to have us. So, our vision of our future is that in our retirement we will continue to use our resources to serve others and we will gradually live more simply – in a smaller house or perhaps an apartment – eventually without the need of a car, depending on public transportation. We envision living within the means that we have.
Second, we expect that as we grow old and ill that we will die. That may be stating the obvious, but it an expectation that our culture works diligently to keep us from embracing. So much of retirement thinking is about health care and about taking heroic measures that cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to make one’s life last a little longer. So much of that is driven by a fear of death. We’re pretty sure that we are not afraid to die. We actually believe that we will live forever and that death is just birth into the next life. We will try to live our lives in a way that we remain healthy, and we want to take our lead from Pope John Paul’s playbook when he said that he didn’t retire because there is a vocation in dying.
Third, we want to do retirement in a way that blesses our children. We are not saving money to will to them. We are spending it on experiences that we can do together with them – vacations, special occasions, etc. while we are still with them. And, when death begins to come, we will depend on our children to care for us. We believe that there are lessons to be learned around helping someone die well that are not learned any other way. We will give our children that opportunity, and in the end, hopefully they will grieve but not as those with no hope.
Finally, we are not going away. While Betty will travel some with me in my work, both of us are committed to mentoring and learning from the generations that follow us. She will serve at GLEC. We will be deeply involved in the Faithwalking work as long as our health allows. We will not be checking out to the golf course, or the lake house, or the airport. We will serve as a way of life until we die or until we can’t any more.
To be clear, we don’t expect to die anytime soon (though that’s mostly not up to us), but it is inevitable that retirement would provide an opportunity to think about our values for this season of life. I believe it is important to be alert to the narrative that our culture gives us about retirement and in the face of that to be responsible for imagining a life that reflects and allows our own values and empowers us to live into them responsibly.
Twenty-nine days and counting with a very hopeful future in sight!