iRetire4Him Show 155: Retired to an RV - and a Pulpit
Jim Brangenberg: Your retirement years can be 30 years filled with meaning and purpose as long as you connect your faith and your retirement days.
Martha Brangenberg: Welcome to iRetire4Him. We are your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. Check us out online at iRetire4Him.com.
Jim Brangenberg: Michael Turner considers himself retired yet what does that really mean? Does it mean he is on a perpetual vacation living in his RV? Or is there more work in his life? The question we'll be answering for all of us today is can there be work and play coupled with meaning and purpose in our retirement years? Will those years surprise us with unsuspecting ministry opportunities? From Michael Turner, this is all part of his story. Let's get going. Michael Turner, welcome to iRetire4Him.
Michael Turner: Thank you for having me, Jim and Martha. Appreciate you guys.
Jim Brangenberg: All right, so how long have you been retired?
Michael Turner: For only about a year, literally a year. And that was literally, I think finally pulled the plug on December 31st of last year. But I had about a five year wind down, which was pretty awesome. So I remained chairman of the board of the company that I co-founded nearly 20 years ago, so I had a great wind down period. So it wasn't quite as abrupt as a lot of folks.
Martha Brangenberg: That's so good for people to hear because that wind down probably has helped these months to look very different. So tell us how God has been using, during your retirement, the time you've had so far.
Michael Turner: Sure. Yeah. I moved to Georgia with my youngest daughter. She was recruited. She's a gymnast. She was recruited by the University of Georgia and I moved to Georgia 'cause I was at, during that wind down period. And it was easy for me to do that at that point in time. And not knowing where - this is a very roundabout way to answer your question, Martha, so bear with me for a minute.
Martha Brangenberg: (chuckling) I will.
Michael Turner: But anyway not knowing where I really wanted to live, whether I would stay in Georgia or do something different once I got down here, that was TBD. I just did not know. So rather than secure a long-term place, I literally bought an RV. At that point Anya and I, my younger daughter and I, were living in an apartment in the Denver area.
So I bought an RV motored out here to Georgia and set that RV up on a campground here in central Georgia. And I know this sounds bizarre, but I lived in that campground, in that RV for 16 months. Literally.
(chuckling)
Jim Brangenberg: So did it never occur to you as you were winding down for five years that you should be winding up something else?
Michael Turner: That's a great question. It may be in part just personality, but I don't get bored. I tend to fill my time with lots of things and I was doing a lot of charity work at that point in time. I was never bored and again, still staying involved in my company to a degree.
There was plenty to do during that wind down period when I was in Colorado. And then, now coming here was much more uncertain because at that point I detached from a lot of the charity stuff I was doing back there and also from a lot of my friends, but still it worked out wonderfully.
You were asking, what has the Lord had me do since I got here? Once I got to that campground and got settled in, it didn't take very long before some of the skills that I had built growing up started coming in really handy, specifically around handyman kind of stuff. I literally was praying, Lord, use me for whatever you would have me do today if you'd had me interact with somebody, let it happen.
And there, I could tell you, I don't know that there was, there were any days when there wasn't somebody that needed help with something. So whether it was fixing a trailer, it was helping launch boats, it was fixing something, driving 'em somewhere, you name it. Just tons and tons of stuff. Very large campground by the way. I don't know, it probably holds. 200 rigs, something like that. And there's also 25 full-time resident families there. So it's a big, it's a big place.
But anyway, he started using me in those capacities and for whatever reason along the way, this family that was working there asked me if I would fill in on one of the Sundays where they do their miniature church service. I didn't even know they had a miniature church service, by the way. But they did, they had this kinda little mini church service thing going on. They asked me if I'd fill in. This was fairly early on when I was there and I said, sure, I'll fill in. I'm not a pastor though. Beware.
Jim Brangenberg: Wait a minute, you're not a preacher, is what you mean. But you were already pastoring at that point in time 'cause you've been ministering to other people.
Michael Turner: And I knew you were gonna correct me on that mentality.
Jim Brangenberg: That's good at least I didn't surprise you. (laughing) 'Cause I'm just, like we're not gonna have that kinda language here on this show.
Lemme just step back before you tell that story 'cause I really - you spent 16 months in your camper, yet clearly you've grown soft in your older age, 'cause now you're in an apartment. Or your trailer got really big. I'm just looking at the, your background. If you're watching this on YouTube, you could tell what I'm talking about. I've seen Michael in the background when he is in his campground. What happened? What happened to that bold, Paul Bunyan esque kind of personality that lived in a trailer for 16 months?
Michael Turner: That's a great question. This is too much information, but it had to do with declaration of domicile. I needed to declare domicile somewhere. And at that point I was literally declaring domicile out of Florida, 'cause it's one of the three states in the nation that allows you to not live there and declare domicile. But I needed real roots somewhere in Georgia, so I ended up leasing a condominium here. Now my RV is still down at the campground. It's in storage right now, but I pull it out and use it on occasion, so it's 15 miles away.
Martha Brangenberg: Oh, that's so good. Okay. So as we are just contemplating this, journey that you've been on, your wind down and then what God had you doing in the campground. Were you missing the daily grind of the job? Because I think that's a question a lot of retirees are fearful of. How did that affect you?
Michael Turner: That's a great question, Martha. I have not missed the daily grind. I have missed the people, interacting with my leadership team, with all our folks, I miss that. And obviously since I moved, I miss my friends greatly that are there in the Denver area. However, the missing the daily grind of the job, no. I started working really early and it was awful. Lot of work for an awful lot of years. Yeah, so that, that I have not missed.
Jim Brangenberg: So in that wind down phase, did you take any time to think about what God had been preparing in you for the next phase of your life? The campground thing is this transition phase, but have you been thinking about what God's been preparing for you next?
Michael Turner: Jim, I tell you, this is the third time I've said this. Great questions. I did not know what he was preparing me for at that point in time. I truly did not. I knew there was something on the horizon. I could sense it, or whatever you wanna call it. He put it in my heart, but I did not know what that was. I knew he was going to use me.
I knew he was going to use my personality. I love people. I love interacting with people. I love helping people. And I knew in my heart of hearts that he was gonna leverage that in some way, but I could not have told you how that would, how that was gonna play out. Had no idea. No idea.
Martha Brangenberg: And I imagine in a lot of ways it's still unfolding and gonna continue to unfold. So just to learn a little bit more about you before you retired, what kinds of things were you doing for fun and to fill your extracurricular?
Michael Turner: Sure. So I'm a fishing nut. Every chance I can fish, I fish. I fished today, so literally. I'm not pulling your leg. I went down, fixed the guy's camper and 30 minutes later myself and my pups, we were on the water.
Martha Brangenberg: You're saying, I dunno what happened. I just, I'm out here. How did that happen? (laughing)
Jim Brangenberg: So is this fishing or catching? (laughter)
Michael Turner: This was fishing. This was strictly fishing. There was no catching. I wonder why they even make me get a license because, yeah, i'm just fishing.
Jim Brangenberg: There's a necessary delineation there for the many of you who don't go out in your boat and cast a line in the water. There's a difference between fishing and catching. Fishing is what you do to enjoy some quietness and to torment the fish in the water with food (laughter) and for them to torment you by stealing your food without actually touching the hook. Catching is where you find a dumb fish (laughter) that says, I want what's hook, line, and sinker, and then you get to bring them home and eat them, and with a tasty breading on top, that kind of thing. So that's the differe between fishing and catching.
So, Michael, as you were saying before, during this last year, 16 months, as you said, you spent it in a campground and God revealed a lot of ministry opportunities for you there, helping people, really just meeting the needs of whatever they had for the day, whether it was having a conversation, helping some of those chronologically superior folks to you do some things that maybe you could do but they couldn't do any longer, but you were there to help people, but then you got asked to do something you don't normally do, which is preach. Talk to us about that.
Michael Turner: Yeah. So I'm gonna roll back just a little bit 'cause I'd forgotten to bring something up when we were talking about
Jim Brangenberg: That's fine. That's fine. You go right ahead. Take over the show. We'll just sit back and relax.
(laughter)
Michael Turner: Okay, perfect. When I was back in Colorado and doing my fishing stuff there, I was doing a quite a bit of guiding. Guiding is a not the right word, mentoring for disabled veterans on the water.
So I knew that I could do something like that here. So when I got here part of what I did was I bought a boat and not anything fancy, I assure you, pontoon thingy. And I could take people out on the boat, sometimes fishing, just sometimes just to get out on the water. But it enabled a lot of conversations.
That led to some relationship building. Over time, I think some of that parlayed into that request to, Hey, can you help us fill in? And what had happened was there was an elderly pastor that was doing the Sunday services on the campground, and he got sick toward I guess this was probably a year ago, and that's when they asked me to fill in, maybe a year and a half ago.
Started filling in and then unfortunately he got sicker and I was filling in more and more, and then ultimately he passed away. Sad part of this story. Wonderful man. Wonderful.
Jim Brangenberg: Wait. Stop again. Bad language on the show. Sad part of the story? The guy dies, goes to heaven. That's a sad part?
Michael Turner: Yeah. He was just a great man. And I'm just sorry to see him go.
Jim Brangenberg: Loss in relationships, but the dude totally won. We need to have that perspective as believers. I've argued people like that all time. What do you mean? Yeah, that's not sad.
Michael Turner: The dude, that's, he won. He won. And yeah, there's no question where that man is, right? That's absolutely right. So it turned into, in essence, a full-time - that's not a good way to put it... an every Sunday opportunity to share the word of God. So I started doing that each Sunday and that really required some deep digging.
I started off doing it just topically, topic after topic. You pick it, holy Spirit. It could be one of a thousand things. So I just pick a topic, whatever the Holy Spirit stuck in my heart for that week is what I preached on. Ultimately, one of the folks there that's a full-timer said, Hey, would you be okay walking us through a book of the Bible kind of thing? I'm like, sure - John. So we started on John 1:1, and we're going through John now.
Martha Brangenberg: That's awesome.
Michael Turner: Then that morphed into, would you do a Bible study for us on Wednesdays? So now we have a Bible study on Wednesday and we're doing Genesis front to back. So it's turned into quite an experience.
Jim Brangenberg: So can you see how, can you see how as an executive God was preparing you for preaching and teaching?
Michael Turner: Oh, yes. Oh yes.
Jim Brangenberg: 'cause you had to prepare for board meetings. You had to prepare - had God been preparing you over the years? How many years have you been a believer?
Michael Turner: Since I was 21.
Jim Brangenberg: Okay. So a few years.
Michael Turner: I'm 26 now, by the way. (laughter) I just didn't age well.
Martha Brangenberg: He was born a leap year.
Jim Brangenberg: In the Martian calendar, right? Yes. (chuckling) So sorry, that just totally threw me off. But can you see the correlation between what God used you for all those decades in industry today in pastoring? Where are the correlations?
Michael Turner: Oh, they're multiple. I think the two biggies were being able to communicate with any sort of person from any background, anytime, anywhere. Because that's what you get in the campground. You just don't know. These people, some of them are lifetime RVs. They literally live in their trailers. They live in their trailers and they move around the country. And some of them have been through some just absolutely brutal stuff in their lives.
And I think just those many years of being able to spend so much time with people as an executive and also growing up in the, my earlier years as a non-executive, just spent so much time with people that, that definitely came into play.
You mentioned also Jim, the preparation for presentations and all that, no question about it. My brain, when I'm preparing a sermon now goes, you gotta connect all this and you gotta get that answer right? You can't walk in there without that answer. Somebody's gonna ask you that answer. Same as I would've done in a business meeting, right?
So you don't get blindsided. That all that led to something, by the way, that led to me going, oh, I'm getting asked questions I don't know the answers to. So at the ripe old age of 65, not 26, at the ripe old age of 65, I signed up at Liberty University to do a master's in theology, specifically around apologetics.
Jim Brangenberg: Wow.
Martha Brangenberg: That's amazing because you're diving in to make sure that you're learning more so that you can help others. And I can see the value in that especially in this time in your life, when you have the time to invest in there. You're not taking away from anything, but, I have, I wanna just stop and celebrate something for a minute because I think it's incredibly unique, and maybe I'm wrong in this, that there's a campground that has a regular Sunday service for anyone to attend. So talk about that for a minute. Is that unique at your campground or have you heard about that other places?
Michael Turner: I've heard about it at other places. I don't know how common it is, Martha. But I have heard about it at other places. In fact one of the other gentlemen that is a friend of Jim's, friend of our ours, collectively is doing a similar kind of thing now. And I know there are other campgrounds that do it. But I don't know, you know, what percent of them do that, right?
Martha Brangenberg: You're filling such a need because I know all the years that we would travel on vacation, when we would travel the same place, we had a church that we always went to and people thought we were crazy. You're going to church on vacation? But bringing the church to them in a campground, really you're opening the door for opportunities that people may never enter a traditional church, but nobody's ever gonna see them again. So what's it gonna hurt? I'm just thinking of all the things they might be thinking in their head that you get to encounter when they enter the doors.
Michael Turner: I just got goosebumps when you said that. 'cause that is dead on. People come in there and many of 'em - now granted, some of these folks are very wealthy and they're in their big motor home looking things. But a lot of them are pulling a beat up travel trailer behind an old pickup truck.
And so you never know, right? You never know. But some of 'em don't have the kind of clothing that would make them feel comfortable walking into some churches. They're in basically camp attire. So they can come in there and the other thing too, and why I've decided to do the Liberty thing is, you never know what you're gonna get asked.
If you conduct it in a very open fashion, which I do, I literally conduct it as a almost more of a discussion than a -I call it a spray and pray. It's literally more of a discussion. You don't know what's coming your way next, to be able to answer some of the very difficult questions, the best degree that I could think of to go after. Now, granted the degree doesn't mean a lot to me, but classes is apologetics and that's what I went after was Christian apologetics.
Martha Brangenberg: That's fabulous.
Jim Brangenberg: If you learn your Hebrew and Greek and Aramaic, then I'll be really impressed. All right. So what have you learned about Michael Turner, about who God created you to be? Now that you're in this next phase of life, retirement.
Michael Turner: What have I learned about myself? I've learned that I have to prioritize in order to get anything done, 'cause you can stir all day long on "stuff." So you've got, what I was gonna share toward the end, and it's not even a question that I necessarily figured y'all would ask me, what were my lessons learned is really a couple things and are you okay if I twist over to that?
Jim Brangenberg: Sure, go ahead. You're in charge. You're used be an executive taking charge. (laughter)
Martha Brangenberg: He's exercising some of that.
Jim Brangenberg: You miss being in charge.
(chuckling)
Michael Turner: I think some real keys to what I've learned about myself is to get up, and get up every morning or do this the night before, write down the top three things you're gonna accomplish the next day toward whatever mission God has you on. And get those three things done no matter what. Three things, not ten. Three. If it's more than three, may not get 'em done, but write 'em down.
Whether it's preparing a sermon, whether it's getting answers to questions you gotta get answers to, whether it's signing up for a class, whether it's working on a paper, whatever it is, the three things that you're gonna get done that day. Do that. So something I learned about myself, I've always been a list guy, but once I retired, I stopped doing the list every day. That caught up with me. It's really easy to stir.
Jim Brangenberg: In today's podcast, we are absolutely touching just the surface of what retirement can look like for you and how to prepare or to pivot from what daily life is looking like. We've got a resource that we'd like to help you, get a hold of to gain perspective, be encouraging, even adjust your thinking about retirement.
We offer our book, iRetire4Him, unlocking God's Purpose for Your Retirement. This book can be yours for just the cost of shipping. Email me Jim at I work for him.com to get a copy Jim at I work the number four him.com. Request a copy, just cover the shipping. We'll send you the book.
Michael, we need to be closing this out, but I wanna give the last question to Martha.
Martha Brangenberg: Okay, for the people that are listening, Michael, I wanna know this. When they're preparing for retirement, what kind of encouragement are you able to give to them? Because you've been learning as you've gone and we always love to learn from other people's situations, right? So sometimes we can maybe get there a little faster or avoid some of the missteps or whatever. What would you tell our listeners and how they can start preparing or pivot, as we said, in their retirement?
Michael Turner: I'd say first thing, know that it's a blast. Start with that. It really is. Secondly, I think, in terms of getting prepared, take care of your health. I know you hear that all the time. You hear that all the time, but I gotta tell you, as a guy that's lived in the campground for 16 months. I see it all day long. On the phone with one of my buddies that's fighting cancer right now. You have to take care of your health, exercise, diet, stuff. So I would say preparing for. Retirement, do whatever you can get. Take care of your health now. It'll carry you.
Secondly, Lord willing, it'll carry you. Secondly, friends. Stay in touch with your friends. Dig in deep with your friends. And don't lose that once you retire, because some of them will still be working. Probably most of them will still be working.
Martha Brangenberg: Right.
Michael Turner: So you have to shift around their schedules. Make sure you stay tight with your buddies. Thirdly, figure out a hobby. Doesn't matter what it is. If you have one, great. Dig in with that or find one. It could be anything. Musical instrument, a sport, preferably outdoors kind of thing. And don't try to do all of this at once in terms of just overwhelming yourself.
It's all gonna come, it's all, the Lord will move the chess pieces and it will all play out exactly as it should if you continue to stay close to him and pray, "Lord, orchestrate my steps today." Which is how I started this discussion way back earlier.
Martha Brangenberg: Yeah.
Michael Turner: As but I think that's really key is, Lord, what would you have me do today? What would you have me do today?
Jim Brangenberg: Michael, come next spring, and people breaking out their campers or motor homes from all across the country and they're heading out towards central Georgia. What campground will they find you at next spring?
Michael Turner: Lake Oconee, Greensboro, KOA, Lake Oconee Greensboro, Georgia.
Jim Brangenberg: So if you're looking for a place to stay, a nice long weekend, a week, or maybe the entire summer...
Martha Brangenberg: but for certainly over a Sunday.
Jim Brangenberg: That's right. Make sure, I was gonna say, make sure you're there on a Sunday so you can hear pastor preacher Michael Turner. I know I'm just giving you a hard time. He goes, undisguised as the average man preaching the gospel. Way to go. Michael Turner. Make sure you check 'em out when you get there to Greensboro, Georgia. What a great thing.
Michael Turner, thanks for sharing a little bit of your story for sharing some encouragement. For everybody listening, thanks for being with us today.
Michael Turner: Thank you guys very much. God bless.
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You've been listening to iRetire4Him with your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. In this retirement phase of life, we all want our lives to be full of meaning and purpose so that we can say iRetire4Him.