Our test, keeping the faith
One blessing for the aging Christian is seeing others your age still keeping the faith.
Many of my old Bible-college friends are now retiring from professional ministry. What a joy to reflect on all the sermons they’ve preached, counsel they’ve offered, lessons they’ve prepared, and heartaches they’ve kept private. And most of them are still finding meaningful ways to serve.
I’m remembering an article I wrote last year, reporting on several no longer hired full-time by a local church who nevertheless are engaged in ongoing service. All of them have found new ways or places for ministry. They are joined by faithful but lesser known leaders all around, setting us an example not only for retirement, but also for any age. Faithfulness is a challenge at every crossroad.
Working with Dean Collins on this new website gives me another example. Dean is certainly not retired, and that’s part of the point. After decades of service in secular and church-related enterprises, he’s still going strong. And strength is surely needed to lead a small university in these uncertain times!
Faithful work
But it’s not Dean’s current vocation, or even his impressive resumé, that attracted me to this project. It’s his faithful work to write these devotions, daily, for almost seven years. He didn’t start out with a vision to produce hundreds and hundreds of helpful challenges. Long before distributing devotional thoughts to the public, he began writing simple daily emails to his family. “I wanted my grandkids, after I’m gone, to know more about what I think and who I am,” he said. After about a year of that, he attended a conference whose leader advised busy executives to document “three things I’m thankful for” every day. Those lists then became the content for Dean’s daily family communication.
At the time he was leading Bible studies for fellow corporate leaders in Atlanta. He let his regular practice of reading through the Bible in a year suggest the texts for these studies. Soon he started writing down a thought from God’s Word to leave with his Bible-study partners. Then he got the idea to share those thoughts with his senior leadership team at Point University. “I decided they needed to understand my faith journey,” he said. He wanted to be a spiritual as well as an organizational leader. By now the notes had become two or three Scriptures, a prayer, and a couple sentences of devotional thought.
“In the stress of my life,” Dean says, “it was the one thing that calmed and refreshed me.”
And it still does. His routine is to retreat to his office or its adjacent porch with a cup of coffee first thing each morning. He reads that day’s Scripture and jots down thoughts or prompts—“what I feel God is saying to me”—that come to him as he meditates alone. At least one of these notes gives him the direction for what he wants to share with others.
“I’m shocked I’m still doing it,” he admits. “But it’s the most settling and meaningful thing I do each day.”
His distribution list has grown to include believers across the spectrum of American Christianity, as well as nonbelievers too. Several have been forwarding the daily e-mails to friends Dean doesn’t even know. When our website designer has time to add them to our homepage, we’ll share testimonies that tell how this encouragement is “settling and meaningful” for his readers as well as the writer.
Elements of faithfulness
Meanwhile, I’m thinking about the elements of faithfulness reflected in Dean’s experience:
Commitment to seeking God’s voice. (Dean has followed his read-through-the Bible-in-a-year -plan for twenty-five or thirty years.)
Passion to share the truth with others hungry for it. (One of his Atlanta study buddies, a lifelong church-goer, once told him, “No one ever taught me how to pray before. No one ever showed me how to study the Bible for myself.”)
Persistence to keep pushing against the next test and seeking the next door to open for God’s provision. (Too many believers my age have slipped into a self-centered cultural Christianity characterized by being satisfied with what they’ve experienced, avoiding new challenges, retreating from risk, and seeking comfort. At its best, this is a weak, watered-down version of faithfulness.)
Dean’s biography points to a man with many talents, but he would be the first to say his record is a story of availability more than ability. Seizing every opportunity God puts before us—that’s a challenge that never diminishes with age. And any of us can commit to it. Faithfulness doesn’t require any resource beyond choosing for God today. This is the vision Dean shares with us in these devotions, and I couldn’t be happier than to join him in the effort. I’ll be better because I’m working with him to serve you here.
“My eyes will be on the faithful in the land, that they may dwell with me; the one whose walk is blameless will minister to me” (Psalm 101:6, NIV).
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash