Deuteronomy 33:25 “As your days, so shall your strength be.”
Evelyn ‘Granny’ Brand was widowed in India aged fifty. She and her husband Jessie had targeted five mountain tribes that were fiercely resistant to the gospel and remained unreached. They had laboured for many years with no apparent fruit until a dying Hindu priest whom they loved and nursed converted and entrusted his children to them. Granny Brand was expected to return to England as a widow but carried on the work by herself until she turned seventy. Her mission board then refused to allow her to stay on – at her age she was surely a liability – but at her farewell party, she revealed she had higher orders to follow!
She’d built a shack in preparation and had a horse she rode on as she traveled from village to village telling people about Jesus. After five years she fell off and broke her hip. Her son Paul, by now world-renowned as a surgeon, said: “Surely it’s time to call it a day.” She refused, and continued another eighteen years! By the age of ninety three, she could no longer ride horseback so some men in the villages who loved her deeply carried her on a stretcher to help the poorest of the poor. She lasted another two years before she eventually breathed her last.
All five unreached groups and a further couple had by this stage come to know Jesus. Paul said of his mother: “This is how to grow old. Allow everything else to fall away until those around you see only love.” She died, but she never retired. She just graduated.
Doesn’t that inspire you? No matter what stage of life we’re at, looking ahead, what will our attitude be? We may ‘retire’ from our jobs but not from our calling. Many think of coasting in self-indulgence from retirement to the grave, but what a waste that would be! Or as John Piper says: “If you don’t believe in heaven, it makes sense that retirement should be as heaven-like as possible.”
Lord, I choose to graduate, not retire. Amen!
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