Retirement (Revisited)

 

So, I’m going to try this blogging thing again.  I’ve tried to decide what I should blog about first.  I
finally decided to talk about my tenth anniversary of being retired.

It seems almost impossible that it’s been ten years since I retired in September of 2015.  I read my blog post about it to remind myself of what I was thinking then.  I remember how stressful my work had become and that convincing me to leave earlier than I’d planned.  I was concerned about our finances.  We’ve done it just fine since then.  We’ve done everything we wanted to do.

Not that my life hasn’t been without stress.  I had a bizarre health scare in 2016.  I served as an elder in our congregation at Central.  It was very stressful.  I had pretty much jumped from one stressful responsibility to another one.  I finally had to resign.  I admire the men who can handle the most important of roles so well.   We went through a huge family issue largely because of the reaction of some people to a bad situation.  Donna’s mom had health issues and passed away much sooner than we’d ever thought.   And that’s not even touching COVID.

I’d planned to travel and I’ve done that.  I got to see two of the places I’d mentioned in my original retirement blog post (Hershey Pennsylvania and the Grand Canyon).   I went to London to see the Cardinals play with a side trip to Paris.    I thought I’d be spending a lot of time at St Louis Cardinal and Kentucky Wildcat playoff games and that hasn’t happened.  I did make a trip to Toronto to see the Wildcats play and got to meet my favorite UK player – Jack Givens.  I did however get to see my Denver Nuggets win their first Western Conference Championship in Los Angeles and then win their first NBA Championship at Denver.   Josh and I made a trip to Abu Dhabi to see the Nuggets play.  Donna and I have made several trips to the Cardinal’s Spring Training in Jupiter Florida and to the Smoky Mountains. 

But the best part is the family things that have happened.  Lucy was born in November of 2016.  Being a grandparent is wonderful.  Since I’m retired, we can make just about any event she participates in.  If she needs anyone to watch her, we are always available.  She is the joy of my life.  Josh also married a wonderful young lady and she’s a great daughter-in-law.

So, I’m sometimes asked what I’ve learned about retirement to give advice to others.  The thing I worried about (money) went fine.  What I didn’t think about was I’d retire to.  You can only watch so much TV and go to so many places.  At first, being an elder was what I thought I’d do.  That didn’t work out.  I then had a brother of mine at Central from church convince to participate in the McCracken County jail ministry.    I never dreamed I’d be able to teach other men the Gospel and give them hope.  It’s the first real evangelism I’ve ever done in my life.  I’ve been doing that for over seven years now and I really enjoy it.  With that and being the “doting Granddad”, I have purpose in my life.

Oh, and how did Donna handle it?  We’ve grown closer.  I’ve taken over some household responsibilities (shopping and running errands).  We’ll be married forty years in March, so we must be doing something right. 

In retrospect, I’m glad I went ahead and retired.