I heard a retired pastor say something in a meeting several weeks ago that has stuck with me. She’s been retired for a few years, but she still comes to the Ames religious leader group that I attend. She said, as we checked in that day,
“So much of my time now is self-serving.”
Retirement had changed the shape of her days. Most of the demands were gone. Most of her time was spent doing things she chose to do.
But, I wondered, is that self-serving? I can’t remember hearing anyone speak of retirement that way.
This woman’s tone wasn’t just that of calm observation. It clearly felt unsettling to her, as she named that. After a lifetime of serving others, and taking that commitment seriously, having time to follow her own sense of joy or interest or rest seemed strange. Inadequate.
I’ve lived alongside many, many people who have made that transition into retirement, and I’ve picked up very little anxiety about their retirement becoming self-serving time. It’s what they’ve waited for, worked for, dreamed of! More freedom, more flexibility, more days spent as they choose. They may wonder how they’ll spend their time; it’s a big transition!
But I had never heard someone describe retirement as self-serving time.
Of course, many of my retired friends and colleagues—nearly all—end up engaging in a lot of what we might call serving time! They volunteer. They care for grandchildren. They drive friends to doctor visits. They show up for church committees. They deliver meals. They mentor younger people.
Given the chance to spend all their time on themselves (on self-serving), most discover that part of a good life is still found in giving some of it away.
My colleague’s comment made me think about the difficult messages we get about time, and how we internalize them.
I’ve always loved to read, and when I was a girl, we made frequent visits to the library. I enjoyed nothing more than stretching out on the couch with a book and losing myself in whatever story was unfolding in those pages.
But I grew up on a farm, with parents raised during the Great Depression who were thrifty and industrious. There were always things to do—canning and freezing and baking and sewing and more. Rare was the afternoon—or even the hour—when I could immerse myself in a book without my mom appearing and saying, “C’mon, we’ve got work to do.” Or “Those cherries won’t pit themselves!”
To this day it’s hard for me to simply do a thing I enjoy, without guilt or intrusive thoughts of what isn’t getting done. Self-serving time has always carried a bit of stigma for me, or shame, evidently.
Every year at our United Methodist annual conference, we come to the moment in the ordination service where we are reminded that John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, had a similarly fraught relationship with time. Standing in line with centuries of tradition, candidates for ordination are asked—as Wesley famously asked in his time:
Will you observe the following directions?
1) Be diligent. Never be unemployed. Never be triflingly employed. Never trifle away time; neither spend any more time at any one place than is strictly necessary.
2) Be punctual. Do everything exactly at the time.
And those ordinands, like all of us who came before them, are expected to (and reliably do) answer, “The Lord being my helper, I will.”
There is something admirable about that seriousness. Time is precious. Life is short.
But Wesley lived before smartphones, before email, before twenty-four-hour news cycles, before a culture that can make us feel guilty for resting and guilty for working at the same time.
Many of us carry around an internal auditor who keeps track of whether we’ve used our hours “well.” We scold ourselves for spending too much time on social media. We wonder whether we should have been more productive. We measure our days by what we accomplished rather than by what we experienced.
I’ve noticed that impulse in myself.
A while back, I decided to stop feeling guilty about spending time on puzzles. I start nearly every morning with Wordle and Connections, and by evening I’ve usually finished the New York Times crossword (with ample online assistance).
My puzzle habit doesn’t change the world. It isn’t advancing my ministry. John Wesley might say it’s me being “triflingly employed.”
But I love the wordplay. I love that puzzles have actual, correct answers—unlike most of the things I spend time on day by day.
Maybe that’s enough.
Perhaps one of the lessons of maturity, and a lesson that would have been good for John Wesley(!), is learning that not every moment must justify itself. Some time can simply be enjoyed.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about time for another reason.
For the last fifteen months, every two weeks, early Wednesday and half of Thursday was claimed by my husband’s chemotherapy. Infusion appointments became part of the rhythm of our lives. We learned to schedule around them, plan around them, and live with them. Many of you have helped us do that, in ways big and small; we’re so grateful.
Some of you know we’ve been in an in-between time, for nearly six weeks, with no chemo. This week we got confirmation that he’ll shortly be starting a new chapter with a daily pill. No more infusion rooms, for now at least.
It’s good news. We are grateful. Dan has arrived at this moment at just the right time to have access to a new drug that shows promise in extending life with pancreatic cancer. More time than we had expected, even a couple of months ago.
But we’re both aware that we’ll miss the better days that we could look forward to, after the hard days of chemo infusion and recovery. At first there were ten good days. By May that had shrunk to maybe six, and often fewer. Still, those good days were manageably good. The two-week rhythm proved oddly doable, and gave us important time facing this together. With a daily pill, what will that look like?
I may need some self-serving—or husband-serving? marriage-serving?—time that is way less scheduled than it has been during Dan’s chemo months. I may miss the ability I’ve had to plan that time, ahead of time.
All this makes me less interested in sorting time into categories like self-serving, productive, and efficient. What if the question—the promise at ordination and each day—is whether we’re paying attention to the life that is actually unfolding in the hours we’ve been given?
Whether we’re retired or employed, whether we’re in the midst of cancer treatment or child-rearing or starting something new, some of our time will be spent serving others. Some will be spent caring for ourselves. Some will be spent doing things that seem important. Some will be spent doing crossword puzzles.
I hope most of it is drenched with love. For God, for those around us, and yes, sometimes for ourselves. All of it—however much we have—a precious gift.
