Reinvestment instead of Retirement

English: Photograph taken at the Washington National Cathedral of the Moses window by Lawrence Saint This window depicts the three stages of the life of Moses, each of them being 40 years long. The first 40 years is depicted in the left panel, when Moses is a prince in Egypt. The next 40 years is depicted in the right panel, which is Moses before Pharaoh. The last 40 years depicts Moses with the 10 Commandments, representative of his time with the Israelites in the wilderness as a lawgiver. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Noah began his approximately 75 year process of building and supplying the ark at around 525 years old, Abraham left Haran for the Promised Land at around 75 years old, Moses started the 40 years of leading the nation of Israel at 80 and Joshua started conquering the Promised Land (a 50 year process) at approximately 60 years of age.

According to the US Census bureau, approximately 77% of our countries’ wealth is in the hands of those 50 years old and older.

Jeremiah and Timothy had to be encouraged to lead despite their youthfulness.

All of these things seem to point in the same direction…back to work.

I don’t mean that you have to continue at the same job until you drop, but if you are a Christian who is looking at the retirement years as a candy store of your favorite hobbies and interests…you might have missed the boat.

The life of a Christian is to be an investment in the Kingdom of God and in eternity itself, not a nest egg that we wontingly spend on ourselves.

This is the 4th Quarter of your life – it is win or lose time.  This is the time in the game that you pull out all the stops, not stop from all the pulling.

God is not finished with you yet.  In fact, the most significant days of ministry are in front of you.  You now have your greatest supply of time, talent, relationships and resources – use them for the Kingdom don’t blow them on yourself.

What is God calling you to do with your next 20 years?  You have raised your family, you have created an independent wealth in which for the first time in your life  you don’t have to do someone else’s work to support yourself.  It’s time for you to enter your own Promised Land… and to conquer it one step at a time as you follow your Lord and Savior.

Don’t retire, retreat or rest.  Our rest will come when we hear, “Well done my good and faithful servant.”

Margins for Blessings

368 ft and warning track (Photo credit: alex_ford)

Margins are not just that fussy space before and after each line of typing that old-school english teachers measure to determine whether or not to fail you.  Margins are boundaries that allow for a healthy life.

If you have ever played outfield and been running backwards trying to catch the fly ball, you know how wonderful that warning track of dirt is.  If you have never really played baseball, a warning track is a strip around the perimeter of the outfield where grass changes to dirt before you slam into the fence/wall.  In Little League, this is what kept you from having your midsection impaled upon the chain link fence.

In driving, the shoulders serve in much the same way.  Every once in a while you veer out of the lines, and the rumble strip informs you that you are about to go off-roading.

In the Old Testament, the Jews were informed that they were to have margins in their fields.  They were not to harvest all the way to the edges and corners intentionally.  Now this was their field, their crop, the fruits of their labor, but they were not to harvest it (yeah, I know that all the Land belonged to God, and the Jews were tenant-farmers, but you get the point).  This was for several reasons:

1. Widows and orphans needed to eat, but didn’t own land.  They had no capacity to earn a living at that time (except of course for prostitution – an unsavory option to say the least).  This was where their food would come from.  They would have to harvest it, thresh it, winnow it and grind it – but they could eat.

2.  Foreigners.  God didn’t want the Israelites to ever forget that He had saved them from slavery.  That they had been the foreigners, and so they were to treat foreigners in their midst – immigrants, with kindness.  This food was for them as well.

3.  Wild animals.  It’s true, God is the first environmentalist – not to mention the best.  take away wild land and farm it, but make sure that you leave food for the animals to be able to thrive not just survive, for God made them on the sixth day as well as us.

Margins for being a blessing.  Most of us today are not farmers – though if you are anything like me you are constantly trying to find ways to return to the land from whence you came – we instead earn money.  Take the principle of the margins in the OT and apply it to your monthly budget.  If you are budgeting all the way to the edge, you are edging out all the blessing God wants you to participate in.  Remember that it truly is better to give than to receive.

Leave margins in your schedule so that you can stop and talk with the lonely person that crosses your path, or help out the stranded motorist along the highway.  If your checkbook and calendar have no margins, you are living a “stress-full”, “blessing-less” life.