At the age when most professionals in his country were being handed a farewell cake and a card signed by the office, Ron Blue did something that sounds almost like a boast until you hear how he meant...
At the age when most professionals in his country were being handed a farewell cake and a card signed by the office, Ron Blue did something that sounds almost like a boast until you hear how he meant it. "At age 62, I started my fifth career," he writes. "I expect this career to last the rest of my life."
Blue was not a man who needed the money. He had built one of the largest Christian financial planning firms in the United States, advised thousands of families, and could have spent his remaining decades exactly the way the brochures picture it: the boat, the golf course, the long unhurried mornings. Instead he took up new work, leading an organization that trains financial advisors, and framed the move not as an inability to stop but as an obedience. He was not retiring, he said, "because God has called me to another activity, ministry, or vocation."
That sentence, and the argument behind it, sits near the center of his 2008 book Faith-Based Family Finances, written with the accountant Jeremy White. It is a sprawling book, thirty-three chapters, and much of it is welded to American machinery: 401(k) accounts, Social Security projections, pension lump sums. We will be honest throughout this piece about which parts of it travel and which parts do not. But the chapter on retirement contains an idea that travels perfectly, and that many African families, at home and in the diaspora, need more urgently than any account type. The idea is this: retirement, as the modern world defines it, is not a biblical category, and it is not a plan for a life. It is the absence of one.
Here is a fact that surprises people on both sides of the Atlantic: the retirement most people picture, a fixed age at which work ends and leisure begins, funded by decades of savings, is barely a century old. It is a product of industrial labor policy, invented for factory economies and exported wherever pensions followed. Blue says as much, and then makes an observation that lands differently depending on where you are reading. Retirement plans, government benefits, and general affluence, he writes, have made quitting work at a certain age an option for a majority of people in wealthy countries. "In most of world, quitting work is generally not an option. And if you reflect on the Bible, it's hard to think of anyone who retired."
Read that from Ohio and it is a mild historical footnote. Read it from Kampala or Nairobi or Accra and it describes your grandmother. Across most of Africa, the Western retirement has never been the norm because the machinery that funds it, universal pensions, deep formal employment, decades of compounding in regulated accounts, has never covered more than a fraction of working people. The market woman does not retire. The farmer does not retire. They slow down, they shift work, they hand responsibilities to children and keep the roles that need their judgment. Which means, and this is the quiet joke buried in the chapter, that the pattern Blue urges on his affluent American readers as a radical biblical corrective is the pattern much of the world already lives. The book stops short of saying that. We will say it plainly: on this subject, the African elder is not behind the Western model. The Western model is behind the elder.
The danger comes from the direction of travel. As formal employment and pension schemes spread through African economies, and as diaspora families absorb the assumptions of the countries they work in, the imported picture arrives too: work is the unpleasant part, sixty-something is the finish line, and after the finish line you are owed rest and owed nothing else. It is worth examining that picture carefully before your family swallows it, because Blue's argument is that it fails the people who reach it.
Blue does not build his case on economics. He builds it on a parable, and he quotes it in full, from Luke 12:16-21. A rich man's ground produces a good crop, more than his barns can hold. He reasons with himself: "This is what I'll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I'll say to myself, 'You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.'" And then the verdict, one of the most abrupt in the Gospels: "But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?'"
Notice what the man in the story is not condemned for. He is not condemned for the good crop, or for planning, or for building barns. His farming was excellent and his logistics were sound. What draws the word fool is his purpose. "The man in this parable had a life purpose: to take life easy," Blue writes. "Eat, drink, and be merry." Everything he stored, he stored for himself, and the horizon of his entire plan was his own comfort. He had solved accumulation and never asked what the accumulation was for. Blue's conclusion: "I personally don't believe that eating, drinking, and merrymaking is what we, as Christians, are called to."
This is where Blue draws the distinction that gives this article its title. Most retirement planning asks one question: can you retire? Is the money sufficient? Blue answers almost dismissively. "The real question is probably not 'Can you retire?' because many can. The question rather becomes 'Should you retire?'" Can is arithmetic. Should is theology, and character, and family. A man can have fully funded accounts and a completely unfunded purpose, and the parable is about exactly him.
Blue's alternative is a word he made up and clearly enjoys: "Instead of thinking of retirement, I encourage people to think of 'rehirement.'" You may leave an occupation. You do not leave your calling. You transition from the work that paid you to the work that God is calling you to next, and the second assignment may be the more important one, because you bring to it everything the first one taught you. His witnesses are biblical and they are pointed: Moses, who did not even begin his great work until age 80 and led until 120. Aaron, alongside him from 83. Anna the prophetess, serving in the Temple and praying over the infant Jesus at 84. "I believe one of the greatest natural resources available to the Christian community is older people," Blue writes, "who have so much to offer in the way of wisdom, knowledge, and perspective. But the younger generation often ignores that great resource."
Now bring this home, because in an African family the stakes of this idea are not individual. They are structural.
Our cultures have historically been better than most at Blue's principle. The elder was never a spent worker waiting out the years. The elder was the family's court of appeal, its memory, its negotiator of marriages and settler of land disputes, the one who knew where the boundaries ran and why the feud with the other clan ended the way it did. Age was a promotion, not a discharge. But two modern forces erode this everywhere. In the cities and in the diaspora, the Western frame quietly reclassifies the elder as a dependent, someone to be provided for and scheduled around, whose opinions are humored rather than sought. And among elders themselves, especially those leaving formal careers, the imported finish-line picture creates a strange vacancy: a man retires from the ministry post or the civil service at 60, healthy, sharp, with perhaps thirty years remaining, and nobody, including him, has named what those decades are for.
Thirty years is not an epilogue. It is longer than most careers. An elder with three decades and no assignment does not simply rest; the vacancy fills with something, often with anxiety about money, or with a slow retreat from usefulness that the family reads, wrongly, as the natural order. Meanwhile the family loses exactly what Blue says it loses: its greatest natural resource, sitting in the compound, unasked.
The remedy is not to tell elders to keep exhausting themselves. Scripture is not against rest; it is against purposelessness. The remedy is for the elder to do deliberately what the rich fool never did: decide, in writing, what the remaining years are in service of. Not "What will I do with my time?" but "What has God assigned to me now, and who receives what I carry?" For one elder that is the mentoring of every grandchild through their first business. For another it is finally recording the family's history before it dies with her. For another it is church work, or the settling of the land titles that the next generation will otherwise fight over, or the daily presence that turns a compound into a school.
A caution as we translate, because the book's honesty requires ours. Blue writes for readers whose material floor is already secured by pensions and insurance, and his "should you retire" question assumes the "can" is settled. For many African elders the "can" is not settled, and no amount of purpose-language should be used to romanticize a seventy-year-old who must sell in the market because her children cannot support her. That is not rehirement; that is a family failing its duty of care, and the book would call it that too. The principle applies above the floor, not instead of it: once the family has secured an elder's material needs, the question of assignment becomes the urgent one. Purpose is not a substitute for provision. It is what provision is for.
Here is the practice we draw from the chapter, and it costs an afternoon.
If you are an elder, or if you love one, sit down with the two questions Blue separates: not just "can I stop this work?" but "what am I being rehired into?" Then write the answer as a short, plain statement. Name the assignment for this season of your life. Name who it serves: which grandchildren, which institution, which piece of unfinished family business. Name what you refuse, too, because a written purpose is also a defense against being conscripted into everyone else's errands. Blue's own version was one sentence long and lasted him decades: a fifth career, expected to run the rest of his life.
This is precisely what the Legacy Statement in LegacyPot exists to hold. Most people treat a legacy statement as a document about what happens after death. Write yours instead as Blue would: a statement of calling for the years you are still here, set down where your children and grandchildren can read it, so the family knows what its elder is for and can organize itself to receive it. A family that has read its elder's assignment does not schedule around him. It reports to him.
The rich fool's plan was one sentence too: take life easy; eat, drink, and be merry. It was fully funded, and it was worthless by morning, because it was a plan for the barns and not for the man. Somewhere in your family is someone in their sixties with the best-stocked mind the family owns and no stated assignment. The finish line they were promised is a myth from someone else's economy. Ask them, this month, what career they are starting next.