“Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the Lord’s work, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.”

1 Corinthians 15:58

Sister Carrie taught me a lot about life. I don’t know how old she was, but she had been retired from school teaching for several years when I first met her. She was the stereotypical “old maid schoolteacher.” She had no car and lived in a rented house in a run-down neighborhood. But she was present for every daytime church activity. She made it to every funeral for someone from our church.

The most impressive thing Sister Carrie did was to regularly visit the two hospitals in the city. Every week, she made it a point to visit everyone in the hospital that registered with the same church preference as hers. Often that involved 30-40 patients, which would take the biggest part of two days. She would sometimes be seen catching a city bus back to her house just before dark. Early one morning I received a call saying that she had experienced emergency surgery during the previous night. I hurried to the hospital, expecting to find her in bed. Instead, she was sitting up in a chair and smiling when I walked in the room. “I’m so glad this happened to me,” she said. “I’ve never been in the hospital before. Now when I visit people, I’ll understand better what they are experiencing.”

After ten years, I moved on to preach for another church. About three years later, I was called back for another funeral. Sister Carrie was living in a nursing home by that time. So, I went there to see her. Walking in, I met her in the lobby as she came pushing her walker out of her wing of the building. I walked over to greet her, expecting to have a nice visit. But she quickly told me that she didn’t have time to talk because she was on her way to a Bible study with another resident in the home.

Sister Carrie taught me the importance of “living ‘til you die.” She knew that we all die, but she also was determined not to be paralyzed by a fear of death or totally stymied by the physical limitations that come with age. As long as she lived, she would serve her Lord in any way that she could. Retirement for her was not a time to sit back and take it easy, but it simply let her focus her service in a different direction from school teaching. Increasing age diminished her energy and what she could do in her service in God’s kingdom. But she kept searching for ways to serve God by serving people.

Too often retirement becomes all about me. It’s time to have fun and do all the things I couldn’t do while I worked. “It’s somebody else’s turn,” can become the mantra. Or it can become a time to find new and even creative ways to serve the Lord. For all of us increasing age brings limitations to our physical and mental capacities. As a result, we can choose to sit and watch life go by, do primarily self-serving things, or find ways we can serve our Lord.

Prior to retirement it’s easy to postpone service and talk about how we will serve God when we retire and aren’t so busy. But it’s not likely we will start serving then either because genuine service has not been part of our lives. We have been primarily takers rather than givers. Then in retirement we continue to take.

A challenge: Make a list of some acts of kindness you could do for people you know, or whom you want to get to know. Add to that list some church or charity projects you could help with. Then start activating some of the things on that list.

Whether you are you are young or old, now is the time to begin to “live ‘til you die.”