Dear Friends

The start of a new year is a time for reflecting and looking back, but also a time for looking forward and making resolutions. I recall the phrase, “A year older, a year wiser?” Well, I certainly feel a year older, though I am not so sure about feeling any the wiser. However, “old age” has certainly featured for us, as a family, this last year, as both Claudia and I have lost our mothers. Through a combination of old age and failing health we witnessed our elderly mothers slowing down and eventually passing from us. “Growing old is not for cissies” was a quote I remember from a friend a long time ago. And even in your twenties and thirties, you start to notice a slight but inevitable slowing down physically. I also recall someone else saying, “Old age is the only thing that comes to us without any effort on our part.”

But does getting older necessarily mean we suddenly become useless, unwanted, and a burden to those around us? Not so! The recent government announcement to raise the retirement age, and the strike by public sector workers over changes to their pensions, has highlighted the fact that people are expecting to remain active as they grow older, and to live for much longer.

God certainly wants us to enjoy life and relax both now, and in retirement, but if this is all we do, and if our only goal in life, or during retirement, is to have as good a time as possible, then we may well fall into the trap of empty, meaningless activity.

God knows your gifts and abilities, and he knows the opportunities you have to serve him. He is also aware of your limitations and wants to help you cope with them, as we all come to terms with having to slow down in our later years. But the choice is this: either we seek God’s plan for our retirement years, or we assume we have passed our sell by date and we drift aimlessly along. Seeking God’s will entails: praying, seeking wisdom from others, searching God’s word for direction, and trusting in Him to guide us. In this way, we make God’s will our priority in our retirement years.

We come across many individuals in the Bible who accomplished great things in their later years. Abraham was in his nineties when God blessed him with a son, through whom the nations of the world would be blessed. Moses was eighty when God called him to rescue the Hebrews enslaved in Egypt. But we also come across less well-known individuals, such as Simeon and Anna, that we read about only once. Both were devout and prayerful, remaining faithful into old age, believing that they would see the Messiah before they died, which they did (when the baby Jesus was brought into the Temple and they just ‘happened’ to be there), and so they died fulfilled and at peace, after living long lives.

In retirement, whatever our circumstances, we have the Lord Jesus to comfort us. Let us, therefore, resolve, to remind one another of our blessings, rather than give vent to age related complaints. Perhaps, of all the activities we are called to be involved in, prayer is the sweetest of them all. Some of us may be bedridden or confined to a wheelchair, but we still have important work to do.

With every blessing in the new year,