After pastoring for twenty-three years in the San Francisco East Bay community of Dublin, Dixie and I retired to Palm Desert, in Southern California, (doesn’t everybody dream of doing this?) and lived in a modest home, rooms all on one level. Our window looked over a pool fringed with desert plants and flowers. We think it will be our last stop before heaven.

It was not.

In 1999, we accepted a call back to the Pacific Northwest where we enjoyed our earliest years of marriage and had planted previous ministry roots. Here we joined the pastoral team of a great congregation for seven more years before retiring again. And an additional seven years were invested encouraging and training pastors and lay leaders throughout the US and Canada in 50+ age church ministry. The standard joke in our family has been, “How many more times can Mom and Dad flunk retirement?”

Dixie and I lived in an older condominium apartment in downtown Bellevue. When we first arrived, we thought it would be for a few years, then on to something else. Each day we looked out our window onto a busy city street below. Downtown Park on one side and shops, restaurants, theaters, grocery stores on the other. And for one of us it would be the last stop before heaven.

Dixie was called on to something else, “away from  the body and at home with the Lord.”[1] And the view from our window changed.

Has this happened to you? Life moves. You move. You awaken one morning, look out the window, and surprise. Even though you didn’t plan for it to happen, the view is different. I used to think quarantine was something astronauts did when returning from outer space. Yet due to an inadvertent coronavirus exposure, I spent several days this month looking out my window in self quarantine. (In the end, I tested negative.)

Life has moved. I have moved. Literally. It will soon be two years since I moved a few miles from my window on downtown Bellevue to a retirement lodge (yep, he retired again!) on a mountainside surrounded by sidewalks with flowers and forests with walking trails.

Today I look out my window and ask God for guidance as to how I should live my life in 2021. I ask questions. And I wonder. What is the plan? Is there a plan? Do the choices I have made and the ones I have yet to make really matter? Is who I am in this powerful new season of life important to God? To others? I believe the answer is Yes. The question then becomes, who shall I be and what shall I do in the years that remain?

Your window view may have changed in 2020, as did mine, but here’s the deal. The One who calls you to himself “will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber.”[2] He is with you still. Now more than ever, he wants to bless you and care for you. “He will keep your life.”[3]

“The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore.”[4]

So look again out your window. What is it you see? Do the choices you have made and the ones you have yet to make really matter? Is who you are in this powerful new season of life still important to God? To others? The answer is Yes! The real question is, who shall you be and what shall you do in the years that remain?

May the Lord bless and keep you close in 2021.

Happy New Year.

 

 

 

 

 

[1] 2 Corinthians 5:8 NIV

[2] Psalm 121:3

[3] Psalm 121:7b

[4] Psalm 121:8