After spending three decades in pastoral ministry and watching countless peers enter their "golden years," I witnessed a disturbing pattern that no one was talking about: the rapid spiritual atrophy of the retired saint. In 2015, I attended a retirement party for a colleague, "Jim," a man who had led hundreds to faith. He spoke excitedly about his move to a sun-soaked community in Florida, joking that his only future worry was his golf handicap. When I visited him two years later, the fire in his eyes was gone. He was bored, cynical, and spiritually lethargic; he had traded a life of purpose for a "gilded cage" of comfort-centric living. It was then that I realized the secular narrative of retirement - that you have "done your time" - is a toxic lie designed to neutralize the most experienced warriors in God’s army. Scripture knows nothing of retirement; it only knows of re-deployment. I decided then and there to reject the "idol of leisure." I realized that if I treated my remaining years as a permanent weekend, I would be discarding the very wisdom God spent a lifetime depositing in me. I coined this new phase the "Sunset Commission." It is not a suggestion to keep busy; it is a mandate to pivot from building a career to building people. I stopped viewing myself as a decommissioned machine and started viewing myself as a strategic asset entering a Covenantal Climax. The objective was simple: take the resources, time, and wisdom I had accumulated and pour them out until I was empty.
Continue reading to see more...