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This kind of thinking suggests that comfort has become a synonym for contentment and a benchmark in financial-planning calculations. Comfort seems to be measured by the ability to eat out once or twice a day, hire someone else to do house cleaning, and fill the hours that used to be taken up by productive work with recreation. Eating out and playing golf are not wrong or even unproductive (I enjoy both myself). But in my late 50s, they are not what I am thinking about when I think of retirement.

In 1985 a doctor friend of mine, who was then 55 years old, told me that in five years he was going to do something different with his life. Actually, it took him six, but in 1991 he and his wife went to Calcutta, to serve as a mission agency's country representatives. They planned to stay three years, but didn't come home for six years. And they didn't come home permanently. At this writing, this couple and his brother and sister-in-law are building an elementary school for girls in an Indian village. Now, there is an offering of a life that has multiplied in its ability to give life.

Like my friend, I am planning on giving my life away. I used to need to be paid to spend time on a project or task. What I want to do in my "retirement" (and what I have already started doing) is to give away the time that I used to charge for. I want to manage my life so that I can say yes to the opportunities to help someone else. So instead of retiring, I'm planning on switching from managing my investments to disbursing my abundance—to serve somebody else.

This idea did not originate with me. This is what the apostle Paul said to the Romans: "I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship" (Romans 12:1, NRSV). That's my life plan, to present myself as a living offering, holy and acceptable to God. Holy, not because I am a paragon of spiritual virtue, but because I have set apart and separated the purpose of my life from what it used to be, from the cultural norm. Paul addressed the same issue with the church at Ephesus. After telling them what God had done for them, he told them why: "So that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus" (Ephesians 2:7). Our lives are to be billboards of God's grace that will be seen by others as they speed down the freeway of life. We are to be displays of the everlasting lovingkindness that we have received from God, displays for those who need to receive it to be whole and alive.

This kind of grace was extended to me in the summer of 1970. After almost ten years in the U.S. Navy, two at the University of Washington, and a flirtation with the flower-child culture of the late 1960s, I was at a crossroads. No matter where I turned, there seemed to be nothing but dead ends. At the age of 30, I found myself married with two small children, no job, and because of my involvement in the student strike of 1970, no future even as a college student.

And that is where I first saw a display of the surpassing riches of God's love. My wife's parents had invited us to come and stay with them in Ohio if we ever needed to. We arrived in Ohio in one of those legendary hippie vans, flower decals and all. I expected to receive exactly what I deserved—the usual admonition to get a haircut, a bath, and a job—from this man who was not only my father-in-law but also head deacon of the Zion Hill Church of the Brethren.

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March 6 2000, Vol. 44, No. 3