Yesterday we looked at an excerpt from John Piper’s “Don’t Waste Your Life” sermon, which included this vignette from Readers Digest:
Bob and Penny . . . took early retirement from their jobs in the Northeast five years ago when he was 59 and she was 51. Now they live in Punta Gorda, Florida, where they cruise on their 30-foot trawler, play softball, and collect shells.”
John decries, and I agree, the “dream” of early retirement. Here is support from a recent Wall Street Journal article about Buchholz, an ordinary high school in Florida, that turns out championship math teams. Read the article if you enjoy reading about innovative ideas in education. I just want to highlight this section about the math coach Will Frazer:
A bond trader on Wall Street in the 1980s, Mr. Frazer retired young and moved to Florida, where he became a scratch golfer and lived the dream for a decade. Then he got bored.
He took a job at Buchholz coaching golf, switched to teaching math, quickly formed a math team, applied the lessons of his experience in finance and turned a bunch of teenage quants into a fearsome winning machine.
“The difference between what I do now and what I did on Wall Street is that I used to get paid money,” said Mr. Frazer, 63. “Now we get trophies.” – Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2022, emphasis mine
My friend and Navigator mentor, the late Skip Gray, used to say:
The happy Philistines [unbelievers] roaring around out there lack only one thing: purpose.
People do better when they have purpose, and Jesus provides that for us abundantly!
Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel. (Philippians 1.27, ESV)
Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way… (Philippians 3.13 – 15, ESV)