Freedom
You wake up in the morning, and it's your day. Hey, you can do anything you want! For forty or fifty years you have labored in the salt mines while someone else held the whip and called the beat: Tote that barge! . . . Lift that bale! . . . Make those calls! . . . Fill those orders! . . . Reach that quota! . . . File those copies! . . . Run those tapes!
Now all is peaceful. Outside the window sparrows are twittering. You stretch yourself in bed and say, "I can lie here, or I can get up. It's for me to decide." But as a generous gesture to humanity, you finally do get up. The aroma of bacon frying is in the air. You shower, dress, and enjoy a leisurely breakfast, and then you slump into an easy chair with the morning paper. Your mate kindly brings you a cup of coffee.
While under the shower, with the warm water streaming over your grateful body, you were possessed of an idea of something you might like to do that day. Now, having finished with the paper, you proceed to do it.
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Of all the blessings we receive at retirement, surely this is at the top: to be able to do what we want, whenever and wherever we wish to do it. Of course one encounters limitations, but that's life, ain't it? Without food we starve, and without oxygen we suffocate. To accept the physical and economic boundaries of retirement is as normal as putting on clothes, opening a window, or going shopping.
But within the boundaries, what blessings! All these years you have been working for the boss. Let's assume he or she was a nice boss, a real nice boss. Let's say you enjoyed working for him or her, that the work itself was pleasant, challenging, and sometimes even inspiring, and that you were really fortunate in your employment situation. The fact remains that the boss was the boss. The paycheck was still the key to your survival. You were a person under authority. You may have been fairly high in the pecking order, but still you were accountable to someone. You may have subscribed to a dozen "leadership" magazines, but you still followed directions and reported to a higher desk.
What I am going to say now, to quote from Artemus Ward, "will be to the pint, right strate out."1 Working for someone else is just great if that's what it takes to earn a living and support a family. Taking orders and carrying them out is a noble and worthy calling. I commend you for it. I did it myself for several decades. No doubt that is the only way society can keep itself glued together.
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But it's not good enough. As long as you have a boss, it's not good enough. I served a wonderful boss for many years. I loved him and loved working for him. Whenever I see him, I still call him "Boss," and if he asked me to do something I would jump to do it. But it's still not good enough. We were not meant to be bondservants: we were meant to be free. Jesus told us that. He did not set up a chain of command. He did not invent the time clock. He said He came to set us free: "If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed."2
The apostle Paul told the Corinthian Christians who were caught in slavery, "If you can gain your freedom, do so."3 I say the same thing to every man and woman facing retirement: If you can possibly do it, get out from under. Take charge of your life. Shape your own future. Look for your own vision. Listen for your own calling. Sluff off the drudgery. Build your own happiness. Get rid of the forty- or fifty- or sixty-hour weeks, the dyspeptic quick-lunch breaks, the difficult fellow employees, the subtle pressures from above. Swing your arms, kick up your heels, give a shout. You are free. Hallelujah!
Did you regret leaving the workplace? Were you afraid to cut loose? Did you want to stay in harness after mandatory retirement? Did you wish to continue to be part of the action, in the swim, as it were? Was there a vague fear that life would pass you by and leave you with nothing, that you could not face yourself if you had nothing to do? Couldn't you trust your own resources?
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As one who has been retired over fifteen years, I would label that a slave mentality. It is what the psychologists call "involuntary perseveration."4 You persist, or want to persist, in doing the same thing long after the reason for your doing it has passed. In his early movie Modern Times, the comedian Charlie Chaplin acted the role of a factory worker who worked a wrench on a conveyer belt all day long. When he got off work he couldn't stop. He walked down the street, noticed the square buttons on a lady's coat and tried to get them off with his wrench. That is perseveration. It may be, of course, that you choose to stay on the job into old age because you consider yourself indispensable. You have decided that either God or humanity cannot manage things without you. I find no Scripture to support that position. What you are really doing is turning yourself into an idol and engaging in self-worship.
Not everyone will follow this thinking because not everyone can handle freedom. Many who have worked for long years are so bowed down by the rigors of employment that they have lost interest. They say, "I've been a working stiff all my life; now I'm going to take it easy." The danger is obvious; instead of its becoming a new and exhilarating phase of life, retirement may turn into nonexistence, and the rocking chair claims another victim.
For others the prospect of freedom is a frightening one. In his great novel The Brothers Karamazov, Feodor Dostoevsky draws a vivid picture
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of the cost of freedom. Jesus is depicted as offering to humanity the Bread of Heaven, but is informed by a high ecclesiatic authority that for most people the responsibility and the risk are too great. The masses do not want spiritual truth; they prefer bread. Jesus makes His dramatic offer to set people free from their sins, but again is rebuked; the church tells Him that humankind does not desire to be free; it would rather remain comfortably in its sins, subservient, secure, and happy.5
Today the world continues to reject individual freedom as a desirable goal for the human race. It says, "If everybody became his own boss, the result would be sheer anarchy, and nothing would ever get done. If everybody stayed in bed, there would soon be no beds. The social contract would be dissolved." And that is all quite true. The very nature of civilization implies that people accept responsibility and work together for their mutual interest.
For the Christian, however, freedom means something more than the right to independence of movement, or even the freedom to choose and hold a job. Freedom in Christ means release from pride, release from obsession with the self, release from the everlasting demands of the flesh. It means freedom in the Spirit to be a help to those who need it. It means being turned loose to serve God and humanity, not from necessity but from a sense of calling, from personal choice.
John Masefield was right when he wrote in his poem "The Everlasting Mercy":
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To get the whole world out of bed
And washed, and dressed, and warmed, and fed,
To work, and back to bed again,
Believe me, Saul, costs worlds of pain.6
But we have a rejoinder: We who are retired have already done that. We have helped to get the world washed and fed. We have paid our dues and served our term in office. We have put on the yoke, and now we are taking it off, along with the hobbles and shackles. We are free!
Now I hear protests, and in a less than perfect world, that can be expected. "What about the Great Commission?" you ask. "Are you saying we are decommissioned at age sixty-five?" "Don't you know the Christian never retires from serving the Lord?" "You sound like a typical 'good old boy,' one who looks after himself and his family and buddies and cares nothing for the rest of the world." "What good is freedom when your crops have failed and you can't find work and you can't go anywhere?" "Millions of people around the globe are dying of hunger and have no place to live, and millions of others have never heard of Jesus Christ, and here you are boasting about being your own boss, eating a big breakfast, and luxuriating in bed."
But, you see, this book is not about growing old in Patagonia or Uzbekistan. It is about growing old in countries where this book is available in bookstores, where people retire on pensions and government subsidies and find themselves
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in new situations and are not certain how to face them. It is for ordinary people who have been sold a gold brick about the dreadful prospect of ageing and retirement and being laid aside and dropping out of sight and all that balderdash. Either that, or they have been so bedazzled by descriptions of the golfing glories of all-adult condominium living that they now believe only millionaires can afford to grow old.
We are not the bosses. We do not head the giant corporations. We do not pastor the mega-churches. We are committed Christians but not necessarily evangelists. We have trouble balancing our budgets, but we do not intentionally waste our money. No matter what our age, we want to live as free men and women in a free country; and, believe it or not, we also want to be generous. We really do care about the hardships people have to endure in many countries of the world, including our own.
So here we are. We can help. We don't have much, we older folks, but we do have something. We are not social planners; we are not United World Federalists; we have seen the collapse of the Marxist-Leninist economic theories. We have outlived the radicals and world-beaters, and we find ourselves appealed to for the kind of simple charity we read about in the Bible. For ourselves we have air to breathe, water to drink, clothes to wear, beds to sleep in, some food in the refrigerator, and some change in our pockets. We are grateful to God, and we will do what we can.
A lay preacher in Kalimantan needs a bicycle
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to reach a village in his parish. A church in Romania needs clothing and medicines for abandoned children. A young Eskimo student in Alaska needs funds to attend Bible school. An evangelical family in Greece is destitute since the father was killed at his workplace. A school teacher in Mexico needs a desk for her classroom. A medical missionary in Cameroon needs surgical instruments that his mission board cannot afford to buy. A house church in the People's Republic of China needs Cantonese editions of the Bible. Children of Christians are dying of malnutrition in Ecuador. A well needs to be dug in southern Ethiopia. There is destitution, homelessness, and ignorance of the Word of God right in our own country.
While I was feeding these thoughts into my word processor, a check arrived from the publisher. (We authors revel in encouragement!) Ruth and I celebrated by marking off a tithe for the Lord's work, and we promptly began writing the checks. Robert Munger once remarked that there is no joy like the joy of spending God's money. It was an act of perfect freedom; we sent our help exactly where we wanted to send it — that is, where we believed God wanted it sent. The first check went to Youth Development International, which operates a massive Christian telephone network out of San Diego to help runaway teenagers.
The older Christians get, the wiser they become in investing in the Lord's work. The love of the Father constrains us, the compassion of Christ
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inspires us, and the wisdom of the Holy Spirit directs us. We open our hearts and our purses, and the blessings come back fifty and one hundredfold. That's what it really means to be free.
Chapter 4 || Table of Contents
1. Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne), "G. Washington, Patrit," Yankee Drolleries (London: 1865).
2. John 8:36 NIV
3. 1 Cor. 7:21 NIV
4. Gordon W. Allport, Personality, a Psychological Interpretation (London: Constable, 1949), 418.
5. Feodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), Book 5, Ch. 5.
6. John Masefield, "The Everlasting Mercy," Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1945), Part 1, 104.
