Transform Your Thinking About Retirement and Health
It is neither wise nor fair to just stop working while expecting family or society to take care of us.
Naturally, if a person plans to stop working and producing income, they should build funds and make other arrangements which permit them to do so. It is neither wise nor fair to just stop working while expecting family or society to take care of us.
However, retirement is a fairly recent invention. Historically, most people worked in some capacity until they died. When illness or other physical limitations forced people to stop working, families usually rallied around the need and took care of their loved one.
Retirement as an institutional idea did not dawn until the 19th century. In 20th century America, that idea flourished into an “entitlement” when the Social Security Administration was founded in 1935. For the first time, the federal government provided a system which guaranteed a stream of income for citizens who reached the age of 65 (of course, in those days, very few lived that long).
Most people would argue that Social Security was a good idea. But, I think Social Security, despite its benefits, carried us into some inaccurate, damaging and increasingly expensive assumptions about life. Consider two of them:
1. Choosing bureaucracy
Historically, most people have had a strong sense of God. Because life was more primitive and usually lived under the canopy of the sky, people looked up more. When one saw the stars every night, it was easy and natural to sense the continuous umbilical connection to God and His universe.
Consequently, they lived a more “vertical” life. And, their “horizontal” relationships were really extensions of their vertical orientation. Therefore, they were more focused on the organic and up-close reality of family, friends, and community.
So, for example, diseases were carried first to family, then to church (“Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him . . .” James 5:14 ESV), and then finally to physicians. And, usually, the physicians were friends, members of the community, and would often pray for their patients. My grandparents even remembered paying the doctor with livestock and garden produce.
But, Social Security (and, admittedly, other government policies) introduced and strengthened the notion of “salvation by bureaucracy.” So, today, we all tend to think in terms of artificial and bureaucratic approaches to child care, health, the care of elderly citizens, retirement, education, death and even religious faith.
Now, millions of “baby boomers” (the largest generation in history) are entering their retirement years. And, it will test the bureaucratic systems more than anything we’ve yet seen in modern times. What demographers call “the pig in the python” (a huge mass which moves through any system) will force an enormous bulk of human financial costs into an already-rupturing system.
Is that perhaps the cost of reliance on an invented system?
2. Severing our dependence on God
Biblically and historically, people of faith saw themselves in a “cradle-to-grave” relationship with a faithful God.
But, the retirement idea – and especially Social Security – virtually draws a line across the sixty-fifth year of life and says, “God may have been faithful in your first 65 years, but you have to prepare for retirement and the time when you’re on your own.”
In other words, that imaginary line says that new rules will apply after the artificially-defined age of retirement . . . God may have been our Life and Sustainer then. But, He cuts us loose once we hit retirement.
Too many Christian believers have bought into the idea which says His nature and attitude toward us changes when we reach retirement age. Many seem to have accepted an unspoken assumption that we can no longer trust Him with the whole of our life. You know, He has others to take care of and, by now, we should have stored up enough money so that we can release Him to leave us and go take care of the younger folks.
The Power of Transformation
Conformity is one of the strongest pressures of life. We all get pressed into the mold of the “group think” around us. The centrifuge of our times spins all of us into buying the same products, reading the same books, watching the same movies and TV shows and thinking the same thoughts.
Even people of faith fall victim to conformity. And, it’s not a new problem. A couple thousand years ago, Paul wrote to the Romans: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind (Rom. 12:2 NIV).” Eugene Peterson’s “The Message” translates this passage so well:
“Don't become so well adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out.”
The way we accept the current thinking about retirement, health care and other issues of life are good examples of how we have become so well adjusted to our culture that we “fit into it without even thinking.”
For example, think of the astonishing disconnection between people and their “health care providers” (what a sterile term!). Whereas people once had a somewhat seamless view of health as an integral part of community and the wholeness of life, now we submit ourselves to an outrageously impersonal, cold and fragmented system.
The same is true of retirement; we all tend to assume we will eventually process through retirement villages and end up in nursing homes.
But, transformation is an entirely different proposition, producing different results.
As Eugene Peterson suggests, being transformed means to bypass the earth’s “best and brightest” solutions and fix our attention on the Creator’s ideas. We let Him “download” change into the core of our being. When that transformation radiates out, it changes our mind, body, family, home, community and environment.
Wholeness
So, what would that kind of transformation look like? In a word, “wholeness.”
Consider this: what if we were as familiar with the faithfulness of God as we are with pension plans, investments and health care coverage? What if we spent as much time immersed in the Bible as we do in investment books and health websites? What if we rejected the sterility of institutional solutions and worked to develop new patterns of familial care? Do you think that perhaps we would catch a glimpse of an integrated life?
The great novelist and essayist Wendell Berry has written,
“From our constant and increasing concerns about health, you can tell how seriously diseased we are. Health . . . is at once wholeness and a kind of unconsciousness. Disease (dis-ease), on the contrary, makes us conscious not only of the state of our health but of the division of our bodies and our world into parts . . .
“To be healthy is literally to be whole . . . I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.” 1
Think of how reconciliation and atonement with God would radiate through all the issues of life. That is transformation!
Ed Chinn is an organizational consultant and freelance writer from Fort Worth, Texas edchinn@charter.net.