How’s Your People Pension?

What does your pension look like? Do you have enough for the rest of your life? Are you sure you are making the best investment? Are you diversified? These are some of the many questions a financial advisor will ask you. But what about your other pensions? Your people pension? Your spiritual pension? Are you intentionally investing in them for the rest of your life?

Your people pension is crucial as you age. One of the most challenging aspects of aging is dealing with the loss of friends. Loss by death is the most obvious. But there are other types of loss. Your friends may move to be closer to their children, or they lose cognitive and physical skills. Whatever the reason, you lose your friend. It is essential to allow yourself the gift of grief. Your friendship took years to grow and deepen, and it is only fitting that you experience deep sadness.

Friendships become even more important as we age. Relationships that are cultivated and nurtured will provide you with comfort and companionship as you go through periods of loss and grief. It’s healthy and wise to look for opportunities to backfill our friendships by looking for ways to meet new people, including younger people. This is especially important since our lives and churches are often segregated by age, which can create isolation.

Young people always bring new ideas and thoughts to our conversations. We can offer them the wisdom of our experience and the assurance that whatever struggle they are dealing with, it will pass. God will use the experience in order for them to help others. Younger friends often bring the gifts of their enthusiasm and skills, especially when it comes to technology.

More important than your people pension is your spiritual pension. Are you continuing to grow in your faith? Or are you getting complacent and spiritually bored? God is not finished with you.

Here are three ways you can spiritually diversify, which will automatically diversify your people pension.

Expand your purpose. Do what you can with what you have. This may be providing a meal, calling a shut in or sending cards to people who are sick or need encouragement. It might include volunteering in your church nursery, office, joining a visitation team, or working with a local nonprofit organization.
Start a support group to walk, pray, study scripture and share your life stories. You might include a study of people that God used in their older years.
Strengthen your spiritual core with the daily maintenance of rest and refueling as you sit in God’s presence, soak up His word and pray. Share with others what you are learning.

People and spiritual pensions are compound interest investments.

God is not finished with you, don’t be finished with yourself. In Philippians 1:6 the Apostle Paul declares “I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” (NASB)

Blessings,

Personal Parable Practices

Are you intentionally looking for opportunities to meet new people?
Are you asking the Lord to reveal new ways to serve others?
Are you thanking God daily for what you do have and you can do?

Prayer

Thank you, Father, for the promise of your presence at all times and in all circumstances. Even when my body fails me, thank you that you do not. Your lovingkindness is new every morning.

Scripture for Meditation

Psalm 92:14 (NASB) – They will still yield fruit in their old age.

Isaiah 46:4 (NIV)

Even to your old age and gray hairs
I am he, I am he who will sustain you.
I have made you and I will carry you;
I will sustain you and I will rescue you.

Jeremiah 31:3 (NASB) – The LORD appeared to him from afar, saying, “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have drawn you with lovingkindness.”