20 What Is Retirement Success?

Alma’s move into the nursing home had been hard and disappointing, just as she expected, although she liked the nursing home and its staff and deeply appreciated their round-the-clock care. As her days in the nursing home wore on, Alma found herself reflecting with gratitude on her retirement. She and her husband had several good years, active with family and friends, before her husband passed away. Alma had managed alright in their home on her own for a few more years, mostly in contentment, although lonely, to no surprise. Looking back, though, Alma really couldn’t have hoped for more in retirement. 

Success

In retirement, you can and should stop chasing everyone else’s definition of success. Retirement isn’t so much an accomplishment or achievement, liking getting through school, getting a good job, and maybe moving into management. Retirement is instead more like a reflection, a time of moving away from productivity and accomplishment and toward finding contentment, richness, and depth in whom you have become. Indeed, that process of realizing and becoming may be what marks retirement success. To call your retirement a success, more than anything you may need to put off the masks and costumes through which you navigated school, family, and work life, to perceive, hear, and embrace your deeper soul, spirit, and self in whom you truly live and with whom you connect with the eternal and divine. Retirement may be a cocooning in which you wrap yourself in memories, while slowly withdrawing from the world. But if so, your retirement cocooning prepares the chrysalis from which you will emerge a beautiful new entity fit for the eternal divine realm. That, friends, may constitute true retirement success.

Peace

Whatever your retirement might do for you, retirement success should include a substantial degree of peace. Life involves natural conflict. To be ourselves and pursue our interests and the interests of our family members throughout life, we must at times disagree with others, even if agreeably, within the bounds not only of the law but of the customs and conventions for civil disagreement. Society also calls us to compete, not just in school, sports, and recreation, but also in business and professions, and on the job. And competition brings its own battles, struggles, demands, denials, and disagreements. Yet all those things should largely cease in retirement. Retirement should bring the end of battles, struggles, competitions, and conflicts. Even disagreements should take a back seat in retirement. Retirement should be a time when the wolf lies down with the lamb and soldiers beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Retirement should be a time of preparing for the eschaton, for the new heaven and earth that will bring a glorious peace. Wouldn’t that be retirement success? 

Security

A successful retirement should also bring a degree of security. One’s work life is a lot about continually securing things, first one’s own provision and then, with marriage and children, provision for one’s family. Until retirement, one cannot stop working without risking insecurity, a rank lack of provision. Only those who work shall have ample bread to eat. Yet ideally, a work life also lays up for a secure retirement. Retirement security doesn’t happen for everyone. Events and circumstances often intervene. But a goal during work life is not only to provide for current needs but also to provide for one’s needs at the end of life when providing grows too difficult. Security in retirement is both a privilege and an obligation. The privilege is to have had enough excess during work life to provide a secure retirement. The obligation is to set aside that excess for retirement rather than to spend it frivolously during work life, so that others don’t have to provide for what one could and should have provided for oneself. A successful retirement is a secure retirement, in which the retiree does not lack for basic goods and services, and is able to provide for the bulk of those goods and services out of stable and secure reserves. Worry over provision should not be a part of retirement.

Family

A successful retirement should also involve a coalescing of one’s family. One need not necessarily spend more time with one’s family, although doing so is a joy and privilege for many retirees. Your family members may live far away. Their circumstances and yours may not permit getting together any more often during your retirement than before. Your family members may alternatively live close, so close that your continuous relationship and frequent interactions with them need not have changed significantly in your retirement. You each have your own lives. Yet a successful retirement should still somehow unify and unite your family for you and around you, whether family members are near or far, and you see them often, seldom, or not at all. Your retirement should mend and heal broken or strained family relationships, so that neither you nor your alienated family members any longer bear the burden of that division. Because you are the one who is retired, not necessarily them, you have the greater opportunity and responsibility to initiate and nurture the healing. Do so. Make your retirement a family success, one in which you unite your family around you. 

Heritage

A successful retirement could also involve your greater embrace of your heritage. Ideally, you don’t just want your family united around you. You may also appreciate having a deeper sense of your connection and your family’s connection with a broader and older, even ancient, special place, allotment, or possession. Your heritage likely means more to you than you regularly realize. If you investigate and accept it, your heritage likely includes an ancient and venerated religion, people, tribe, ethnicity, philosophy, and national origin, or a wonderful combination of those heritages. Recognizing the cultures, customs, folklore, and myths on which you stand can give you a perspective and connections far beyond your own life and the lives of the few family members with whom you have lived. You may perceive a new grandeur in which and through which you have lived, lending greater meaning and resonance to the course and events of your life, and to your accomplishments and character. You may also take greater satisfaction in having lived in the time and way in which you lived rather than some other time or way. Discover, embrace, and value your heritage for a successful retirement. 

Legacy

You’ve seen in a prior chapter how a successful retirement can also include leaving a rich legacy. If, in your retirement, you put in place a last will and testament that blesses your heirs, a trust for any minor or mentally incompetent heir, or a family foundation to bless your community in charitable causes, then you have left a rich and rewarding legacy, and your retirement will have been a success. If, in your retirement, you made frequent or significant charitable donations, or made frequent or significant family gifts, then again you have left a rich and rewarding legacy, and your retirement will have been a success. If, in your retirement, you frequently shared memories with your family members, while also making new memories, captured in stories, images, and sentimental items, then once again you have left a rich and rewarding legacy, and your retirement will have been a success. If your memorial has your family members and friends remembering you fondly for your character, commitments, care, and heavenly assurance, then you will have left a rich and rewarding legacy, and your retirement will have been a success. 

Community

A successful retirement could also leave you with a strong sense of community, the feeling that you have participated, engaged, and belonged as a vital member of a larger group of individuals unrelated by blood but related by common interests if not also affinities. Whatever neighborhood, village, town, or city in which you live, you have interests in common with others who also live there. You may or may not like or respect those other residents. They may not share your own heritage and commitments. But they are still your community, and your ability and willingness to engage them in some fruitful manner can be a significant credit to your retirement. You gain something significant, and they do, too, when you count yourself a contributing, caring, and responsible part of your community. You have several ways in which to do so, whether leading, volunteering, donating, advocating, serving, admonishing, guiding, correcting, voting, or just celebrating and encouraging others while being a good neighbor. Make community a part of your retirement, and your retirement will be a greater success.

Body

Being a participating, worshiping, and praying member of a church is another indication of retirement success. Being involved in your church is another form of community. But as the body of Christ, a church is a special form of community. A church is the eyes, ears, hands, feet, and heart of Christ in the world. When you participate in a church, whether in worship and through service to the church internally, or in outreach to the community externally, you are the eyes, ears, hands, feet, and heart of Christ. Having a sense of community is one thing. Being a functioning member of the living body of Christ is another, more-special thing. Find the role, place, and posture in church where Christ is most present to you and active in you, and you will experience something bigger, deeper, and divine that you cannot experience in the same way in a secular community. Live a sacred life in the body of Christ, and you will have succeeded in retirement. 

Depth

A successful retirement should indeed move you toward a greater depth of self, soul, and spirit. Family life and work life can be so busy that you find little time to process and reflect for greater depth. Family life and work life can feel like skipping along the surface of a deep lake. The depths look inviting, but you’re too busy swimming along the surface to explore the depths. Retirement should bring the time, opportunity, and imperative to reflect for greater depth. Retirement should be a time of getting past the roles and personas through which you navigated family and work life, to discover or rediscover your soul, not the person the culture made you but instead the person the creator formed as you. Retirement should be a time of stopping your projection of your artificial personas, to instead be and live as you genuinely are. Retirement should allow you the time and energy to integrate your consciousness with your deeper and richer unconscious self. If you can count your retirement as having made you more aware of your true self, then you can count your retirement as a success. 

Richness

A successful retirement should also have a richness to it, not necessarily a material richness but instead a spiritual, emotional, even sentimental richness. Because retirement is fundamentally a cessation of productive activity, even if a gradual retreat, retirement should have a poignant and resonant feel to it. Retirement is frankly a time of gentle and gradual loss, even if natural, necessary, and to a degree also welcome loss. Retirement should thus have a mixed tinge of sadness for letting go of the activity, productivity, and purpose of the past, while simultaneously welcoming the present and longing for the future. Retirement shouldn’t be all happiness, fun, and games, although enjoy plenty of those things, too. Nor should retirement feel like a sterile march toward the grave. Retirement should instead have the rich weight of emotional complexity, a layering of relief and regret, gain and loss, grasping and letting go. If you feel rich and complex emotions in retirement, then count your retirement a success. 

Assurance

To be a success, retirement must also foster and enhance a confident grasp of eternal assurance. With Christ’s assurance of eternal life, death isn’t an end but instead a beginning. With Christ’s relief from judgment, release from damnation, and rescue from death, the end of earthly life is the beginning of eternal life in the heavenly realm. A retirement that hides this truth or weakens the retiree’s resolve to grasp it is the worst possible retirement, no matter how otherwise delightful its qualities. A successful retirement should bring you closer to Jesus so that you know one another as Savior and rescued, and as confidantes and friends. Devote your retirement to fostering conversations with Jesus. Listen to what he has to say to you. Let him know you. He wants to do so and will, if you simply lay down your self-righteousness to let him speak with you and embrace you. He is deep within your heart and all around you, arranging things for you to see him in the only way that will lead you genuinely, voluntarily to him. He won’t force you but will invite you. If, in your retirement, you begin or continue and then complete your embrace of Jesus Christ, while welcoming his embrace, then your retirement will be the wildest success, no matter any of its other features. 

Reflection

How successful do you anticipate your retirement to be? If you are already retired, how successful has it been so far? What are your measures for retirement success? What do you need to change or reject to increase your likelihood of retirement success? What do you need to continue or accelerate to increase your likelihood of retirement success? Do you expect your retirement to be peaceful? How can you make it more so? Do you expect your retirement to be secure? How can you make it more so? Do you expect your family to unite around you? How can you help them do so? Do you perceive your connection with your heritage? How can you do so more? Are you arranging to leave rich legacies to your heirs and friends? Do you have a strong sense of community? If not, how can you increase that sense? Are you participating in the body of Christ? If not, what do you need to do, to do so? Have you set aside your old work persona to reacquaint yourself with the deeper, genuine you? Are you experiencing or expecting to experience rich emotions, related to your past, present, and eternal future? Do you have the strong assurance of salvation in Jesus Christ? Are you letting him know you? 

Key Points

• You can find several ways to measure the success of your retirement.

• Your retirement is a success if you leave strife behind for peace.

• Your retirement is a success if you find security for your provision.

• Your retirement is a success if your family unites around you.

• Your retirement is a success if you connect with your greater heritage.

• Your retirement is a success if you leave a legacy to heirs and friends.

• Your retirement is a success if it leaves you with a sense of community. 

• Your retirement is a success if you participate in the body of Christ.

• Your retirement is a success if you reach a sense of personal depth.

• Your retirement is a success if you experience emotional richness.

• Your retirement is a success if you end it with strong assurance.