Consider Your Calling by Gordon T. Smith

Author:Gordon T. Smith [Smith, Gordon T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780830899180
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2016-01-05T05:00:00+00:00

We ask, given our history and what we have learned along the way, Where do we see the potential to invest our time? To chair the board of a nonprofit, to pour some energy into that garden out back that we have so longed to give time to, to complete that novel that we’ve always wanted to write, or to find huge satisfaction in teaching a Bible class at our local church? For some there will be significant continuity with what they have been doing already: a Tony Blair, for example, who leverages his experience as a prime minister of the United Kingdom to work toward advocating peace in the Middle East. And for others, there will be more discontinuity, where they leave a medical practice or managing a trucking firm and set up a studio in their home and the painting hobby now becomes no longer just a hobby but the focus of their day.

But either way, it means letting go. We do not cling to the former structures and symbols of our lives. We let go of the need to go to work each day, to an office or a role that we know is but the vestige of what it used to be, and now chart a new course that reflects the best possible focus of our creative energies.

It is crucial here, and this must be stressed, that we move into our senior years with grace and good humor. The world does not need grumpy old men and women who now have all kinds of time on their hands to criticize their successors, or to criticize the next generation. It is an understood rule of thumb in the US presidency that a former president never publicly criticizes a successor. Never. We move into our senior years as sages and elders who bless those who follow us.

And now, in our senior years, we respond to opportunities that come our way to bless the next generation, to empower those who are younger, to encourage them and, as invited (remember, no unsolicited advice!), to counsel and offer words of insight into the challenges that those who are younger might be facing.

If we are going to move into our senior years with integrity and grace, it will mean not only that we graciously accept that we are growing older, but that age is not merely a factor in our vocation but integral to our vocational identity. And this means that we actually embrace the aging process. As someone put it so well about the Canadian singer and songwriter Leonard Cohen: “He writes songs that could only be written by an old guy.” That’s it. We embrace our senior years not with regrets about the passing of life but eager to see what the new chapter will bring and what new possibilities emerge precisely because we are older.

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