Leisure or Calling? Evaluating the Work of the Encore Years
Retirement has been defined as a season of long-awaited freedom. After decades of schedules, deadlines, and responsibility, the dream for many people is quite simple: finally having time for themselves.
Many people have not thought much deeper about retirement than wanting to travel, see grandkids, and embrace hobbies like golf and the newest fad: pickleball.
When Career Is Over - Who Am I Now?
After the initial honeymoon of retirement, Steven Yoder articulates the tension many retirees feel:
“What I didn’t anticipate [about retirement] was how hard it is to fill all the void, how the loss of work anxiety would foment a new anxiety. For the first time since before kindergarten, I don’t have a central organizing force around which to arrange my life. No one warned me about how disorienting that absence would be.”
The question becomes: Who am I now? What do I do now that I no longer do what I once did? These questions reveal questions about our purpose.
For decades, career structures our lives. We wake up, go to work, and it shapes our schedule. Even if you did not work outside the home, the work of your spouse was likely one of the most significant orienting factors of your weekly schedule.
In our career years, we have a job title, a job description, a place where we prove ourselves, have a built-in network of relationships, and we receive a paycheck for our efforts. Once we retire, many of those built-in rhythms disappear, and the effect can be disorienting.
The Call to Know God Intimately
Our misunderstandings of career lead to our misunderstanding of post-career life. The biblical story begins with God’s work - creating the world and everything in it, making us in His image, and giving us work to do. Work was good, and still can be very good.
Paul David Tripp writes:
“The Bible presents work, not as a curse, but as a principal part of God's ordained plan for humanity. My labor is part of an agenda much greater than the acquisition of momentary material pleasures.”
Work in our Encore is knowing that our identity is not found in our financial investments or . These words in Jeremiah 9:23-24 help us understand how easy it can be to celebrate our own achievements:
“Let not the wise boast of their wisdom or the strong boast of their strength, or the rich boast of their riches, but let the one who boasts boast about this: that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth,for in these I delight,” declares the Lord.”
Our Encore work begins by knowing Jesus and wanting to work just like He did.
Jesus’s Call to Work
When we look at the life of Jesus, he embodied this perfectly. In John 4:34, Jesus says, “My food is to do the will of my Father, and to finish His work.” Jesus did not stop working until He lived a perfect life, died a perfect death, and rose from the dead to conquer sin and death.
As we think about the way we will finish life in our Encore years, we do not want to relegate ourselves to the sidelines. We recognize that Jesus served, sacrificed, and endured all the way to the end. We invite God to show us the work, we commit to abiding in Him, and we strive to expend ourselves as a response to all He has done for us.
And we recognize that, even as we age, all of the power comes from God himself. As Colossians 1:29 exhorts us, “For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.”
The great of hope of our Encore years is that God will be at work in our lives in fruitful ways.
A New Call of Work
When we transition from career to Encore years, there is an important mindset shift in how we value work. While we once worked for income as a necessary part of our providing for ourselves and our families, the work can shift away from productivity and achievement and more toward fruitfulness and service.
Jesus said in Mark 10:45, “The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
People in the Encore of life are measuring life by:
Family relationships - building a godly legacy with their children and grandchildren
Loving their neighbors - the faithful and enduring work of loving those who live next door and in our communities
Mentoring - being present to see others grow in specific areas of life
This is all in service to making disciples - seeking opportunities to invite people to follow Jesus and to see people mature in Christ
We aim to expend ourselves by serving the needs of others. This is the meaningful work of our Encore. We believe this is the culminating work God desires to do in each of us!
Wherever you are in the process of thinking about your Encore, there are a few simple next steps to choose from:
If you’d like to talk one-on-one, I’d be glad to connect.
Or if you’d rather ease into the conversation, you’re welcome to join us for one of our weekly lunches.
