Redeem the time as our time together runs out (Years 28 and Beyond)
By Kermit Rowe
Encompass Relationship Facilitator
The kids are long gone, living their own busy lives. The grandkids are getting older, not so cuddly and openly loving as they used to be. Medicare and retirement loom, and with them, big questions and concerns you never had to think much about before. You begin to face sobering and heart-heavy questions together when your marriage hits and passes the three-decade mark, like:
Have we saved enough to maintain the lifestyle we want to live for the remaining days we have left together?
How much longer will Social Security be viable, and will I be able to get back the money we invested in it during my working years?
How will deteriorating health impact our relationship?
And the most heart-heavy one of them all: How much more time do we have together?
The trick is not to let those concerns, dare I say fears, steal the joy you should enjoy in your remaining years of holy matrimony. It can be a tricky trick!
Every self-proclaimed expert has advice, some good and some terribly bad … scam bad! Who do you listen to? Who can you lean on? How do you know who or what to rely on?
My wife and I are just three months apart in age; she has already hit “Medicare age,” and I’m sneaking up on it. We are finding that the best advice is to lean not so much on what we know but on Who we know.
The God who we’ve done our best to follow through our first nearly four decades of marriage not only can lead us through the remainder of it, but WILL lead us through it … if we listen to Him.
We are urged by the Bible to “redeem the time” we have. In other words, enjoy it. To do that, we can’t focus on the negative. And as we grow older, more negatives enter our life. More losses of health, friends, abilities. We must focus on the positive, on what we do have, not what we don’t have.
We must cherish the fact that we still have each other, which means we still have what’s most important: each other and God. They are meant to be “golden years,” and the losses we’ll experience together have been allowed by the God we are trusting to get us to heaven, where we’ll be with Him forever.
So we must challenge each other to remember these most important things as we lose more and more of the least important things. We must focus on what’s eternal, as what’s temporary slips away.