Monday, April 1, 2019

No Place Like Home

You have recently retired, or you are looking forward to retirement in the next year or two. There are many things you are planning for your golden years. Traveling to exotic places, moving to a place where you can bask in the warmth of the sun, playing golf or whatever it is that you enjoy doing; you just want to spend more time doing what you’ve always enjoyed doing. You pray that you health and your spouse's health will remain good so that you will be able to see your plans fulfilled.

There are other factors you may not have thought about. My wife and I retired from our positions in education fourteen years ago. I continued serving in churches as a minister until almost five years ago, however, we still had time to do about anything we wanted. Our health has held up, but we have found that our desires have changed. Up until the last year or two we traveled quite a bit, and we were pretty much doing the things that we had planned and looked forward to doing. Lately, however, when we planned something that would take us away for a few days we found that before it came time to leave we had already begun dreading our journey. We discovered that what we enjoyed doing most was staying home. Actually, my wife has preferred staying home for several years.

Driving very far wears me out. My back and hip begin to hurt after about an hour in the driver's seat. I have a problem reading the road signs. I have one eye that does not serve me well. I am not able to focus quickly enough, and by the time I see where I need to turn I have already missed the place. We don’t enjoy airports and flying anymore. That has become too much of a hassle for us.  I think we like to stay home because everything is predictable, no surprises. We enjoy our new neighbors and our new house. Most of all we enjoy our church. We like being a part of our choir. I enjoy being our choirs chaplain, serving as deacon the way deacons are supposed to serve, and that is to be servants, not take care of church business concerns, and we enjoy the other responsibilities that we do. We love our pastor’s sermons. And we love watching our church grow in ministry not just in our community but all over the world. We hate missing even one service at our church.

I guess you could concluded that the big plus with our retirement is that we get to stay home. Many years ago someone said after traveling down a yellow brick road, “There’s no place like home!”

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