“Ahhh! This is

the life.”

Since retiring from the world of work four years ago, I have experienced several foundational… you might even call them seismic… shifts in my life.

There has been, naturally, the anticipated change in income.

There was, for Joan and I, the voluntary relocation from Overland Park, Kansas to Fort Collins, Colorado.

I also experienced the immediate loss of the “constipated weekend syndrome.” You know that situation where everything that is NOT related to work MUST be crammed into those precious 48 hours of Saturday and Sunday. 

It took a while, but I think I have rolled with each of these life changes pretty well. The one change I am still trying to get my head around is the radical rebalancing of the HAVE TO and WANT TO sides of my life scales.

Here is what I mean by that; during those wonderful years I spent as a wage slave, I felt as if every imaginable particle of my life was piled over there on the left side… the HAVE TO side. I have to go to work. I have to eat. I have to sleep. I have to mow the lawn. I have to pick the kids up from school. I have to attend church. I have to go to that meeting on Thursday. I have to pay the bills. I have to feed and walk the dogs. 

The whole concept of WANT TO seemed exotic… far away… dreamy. “Can you imagine…” I often used to say to that Man in the Mirror, “… what it would be like to do one or two things every day simply because you WANT to do them?”

It sounded too good to be true.

Now I have finally arrived at that idyllic wonderland. And you know what? It is just as wonderful in practice as it sounds in theory. For example, I began to feel a little sleepy there in the middle of that last sentence, so you know what I did? That’s right. I stopped writing and TOOK A NAP!

Of course, it isn’t 24/7 beer and skittles here in Retirementland. But it is pretty darned close. 

All of which raises a couple of interesting questions for me… the first is this one; is that the definition of FREEDOM? I mean, is the person whose scale is weighted heavily on the WANT TO side automatically more free than the one who tilts way over to the HAVE TO? Or is it possible that we can be just as much a prisoner of our whims and appetites as we are to deadlines, schedules, and obligations?

The Apostle Paul had a thought or two on the subject of freedom. After all, he had plenty of time to reflect on freedom while he was IN PRISON in Rome! Writing from his cell to the members of the church he started in Galatia, he said, “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become enslaved to one another.” (Galatians 5:13, NRSVU). 

This is some pretty “next level” stuff Paul is talking about here. When you think about freedom from his perspective, it is much deeper than some guy in Colorado deciding to lay down and take a nap or eat a whole bag of Doritos just because he “wants to.”

Viewed through the eyes of Paul, freedom is much more than counting the number of whims you are able to indulge in an average day. Freedom is that state of mind in which every HAVE TO can become a WANT TO and vice versa. 

At the same time, it is important to stress that no matter how much we might vibe with Paul and his definition of freedom, we are still called to actively advocate against any human system that strips people of social, economic, or political freedoms. When Paul reminds us that, “For freedom Christ has set us free…” (Gal. 5:1, NRSVU), he is, after all, talking about ALL of us…

… not just the carefree retirees among us.

Abundant blessings;