“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”  So goes the cliché, but like all clichés, there is a kernel of underlying truth.  Today, I have been reminded of this.

Today I am now officially redundant, and this is the first day of my enforced retirement.  With only three months to go until I officially reach ‘the age’ it is improbable that I will start looking for another job and I have realised for some time that I need to take a break – a holiday that is somewhat overdue.  And what I have been aware of for the last three months has now become a reality.  I woke up this morning and everything had changed – or so I thought.  No more work. 

Retirement.

  

And it starts now!

During the course of parish farewells, I received a card from some of my parishioners (I was an Anglican vicar).  In it, one person wrote, reminding me that there was no such a person as a retired Christian.  I had to agree. How can there really be retirement if we believe in eternal life?  There may well be seasons we pass through in our life, but our relationship with God does not suddenly cease: we are still his child, he is still our Father.

The psalmist David wrote

    Listen to my voice in the morning, Lord.
    Each morning I bring my requests to you and wait expectantly.  (Psalm 5:3 NLT)

It is a timely reminder.  I need to keep to the familiar and beneficial routines that have undergirded my life up till now.  I need, even more than ever, to start each day with God: prayer, Bible reading, reflection, and, as David reminds us a time of bringing my requests before God and waiting … expectantly waiting. 

 

In the past much of my life had been quite predictable in the tasks that lay before me.  Parish life had its tasks and rhythms and although there was often the unexpected there were was an underlying order and routine

.

Now, I am retired but nothing really has changed fundamentally, except that the rhythms of life will be different and the tasks change.  Whatever each day will bring, I will need God go before me and with me (behind me, too, covering up my mistakes!).  That will never change.

 

Each day there will be a new expectancy of what God has in store.  

Let the journey begin!