I love road trips. I love the sense of adventure, the sense of unexpectedness. For most of my road trips I do try and make a plan of action, but after we leave – more often than not plans change.
While, there are certain aspects of road trips that are the same, the type of road trips has changed for me over the years. When I was in college, a group of friends and I planned a road trip from our college in Iowa, to my home in Vermont, down to NYC and then back to Iowa, about 2,600 miles. It was fun, it was adventurous and it was memorable. Guys, traveling in a car, stopping where we needed too, not knowing what would happen day to day. I will never forget it.
Last December, my family took a road trip. We left our town in NY and drove Virginia for a friends wedding and then up to Vermont to visit my family and back home for a total of 1,485 miles. We loved the wedding and we loved visiting my family, but traveling that much with two children under five has its challenges. We stopped more, we planned more (and tried to keep on track), even though we wanted to keep some aspects of the trips adventuresome, you can’t do that too much when you have two small children.
As I get older I start to ask myself…..am I too old for adventure, am I too old for road trips? Am I too old for that kind of self-expression? It’s hard to think that the old I get the worse this may be, I have always imagined retirement as a time when I will be traveling the US and the world with my wife.
The truth is that we don’t tend to see many role models of lively, intelligent old people in the media, I often think of the ventriloquist Jeff Dunham and his puppet “Walter the grumpy old man”.
The fact is that life expectancy is up from age 45 in 1900, to 80 for women and 74 for men in 2000. This means that things are changing both in the world and in the church. Of course, there is still the likelihood of some physical decline as we age, but many older people are discovering that their mental health is more important to them. They tend to shrug off their aches and pains and concentrate instead on growth and development in other areas.
They become much more spiritually aware and keenly interested in things outside of themselves. They want to be more active in a way that we are not use too. They make their own choices, and stay involved with meaningful activities long after they “retire.” Because let’s face it, no one ever really “retires” anymore.
So how do we minister to those who like to go on road trips and those who seem to slow down but never really do. What do you do to stay active physically, mentally, and spiritually as you get older? Or if you are younger, how do you imagine your “retirement?”
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