A Fresh Wind in Your Sails
A Fresh Breath of the Spirit in Life's Later Years
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“God, make a fresh start in me … Put a fresh wind in my sails!” (Psalm 51:12)
In all my years I had never encountered that text before. Which, of course, is because it isn’t in the NRSV versions which we have in our church’s pew racks. It’s taken from a new translation called “The Message”. It is one of the many modern translations which I don’t own and which I don’t particularly like because of my life long relationship with the King James and the RSV. But what a new revelation it provided. “God … put a fresh wind in my sails.” Here was just the prayer that I needed now that I am in my retirement years. A prayer to find a fresh wind in my sails. Athletes call it, ‘Getting a second wind’. Or, as those of us in our later years of life feel like Job that our “sprits are spent and our days are extinct,” (Job 17:1) are discovering anew that we are finding a fresh breath of the Spirit filling our hearts with new energy and purpose for life. Like Job we too have come to experience the final answer to life’s existential question:
The truest test of life comes during one’s retirement When you choose how the rest of your life will be spent.
The following chapters are a few wisps of that wind of the Spirit which I hope will fill your sails as you enter these wonderful retirement years.
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About the Book
This book is about the joys of aging. All too much has been written and published about the fears and perils of aging with the focus of most volumes being about the perils of falling; of not having enough money; or of having arthritis, osteoporosis, cancer, heart attacks, vision and hearing loss, loneliness, dementia, memory loss . . . just to name a few. I have yet to read a book about the joys and pleasures of aging. Well, I have been glorifying God for over sixty years, and now I feel it is time to simply enjoy him forever. And that is the first gift of aging—the pleasure of enjoying God forever, of not needing to strive with him, and of no longer needing to fulfill the demands of glorifying him or pleasing him. It all comes at about the same time in life when your children no longer sense the need to please you or to make you proud of them. It comes at a time in life when you want to be in each other’s presence simply to enjoy one another, which truly is the chief end of man.
About the Author
Dr. McCall was born of Presbyterian missionary parents in Lebanon. Educated at Princeton, Luther, Glasgow, Yale, Edinburgh, and Oxford. He was for 19 years the Sr. Minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Rochester, MN. Member of the Mayo Clinic IRB. Served on the Nebraska State Bd. of Parole, A Retired Commander in the U.S. Navy and Korean War Veteran. Adjunct Homiletics Professor. Author of two previous books. Member of MN Governors Commission on Suicide. Rotary President and an Honorary Admiral in the Nebraska Navy. The author lives with his wife Barbara, a retired attorney in Madison WI.