iRetire4Him Show 140: You Only Have Today

Jim Brangenberg: [00:00:00] You've tuned into iRetire4Him, a podcast dedicated to Christ followers all over the country seeking purpose in the retirement years, because your retirement years can be 30 years of purpose driven, fully funded ministry, making impact in ways and places you never imagined.

I'm your host, Jim Brangenberg. Please check us out online at I retire the number 4 him.com. iRetire4Him.com. You may think you know what God has in store for you when you retire, but usually our heavenly Father isn't interested in what we think is best for us. He knows what's best for us.

Joan Lovesstrand Farley has a fascinating life story, and her retirement years have already had some twists and turns, including writing a powerful fiction book on mentoring. She's here today to tell us her story. Joan Farley, welcome to iRetire4Him.

Joan Farley: It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Jim Brangenberg: So Joan, you have had an around the world life while growing up. How did that shape who [00:01:00] you are today? What's some of your story?

Joan Farley: My parents were missionaries in Indonesia and because of political turmoil and upheaval, my dad was accused of being a spy. And we got shipped out of the country after he spent some time in prison. And so we had to go somewhere else.

So the mission sent us the Trinidad. That meant that I needed to go to boarding school 'cause Trinidad was under the british school system. So I went to boarding school in Venezuela, so that's country number three. And of course the US made four countries when I was growing up.

Jim Brangenberg: So your parents had to suffer for the Lord in Trinidad and Tobago, surrounded by those incredible blue waters. And then you had to suffer at a boarding school in Venezuela back when Venezuela was a pretty cool place, full of money, and as I hear, oil running over the roads, there was so much oil. Unbelievable.

So how did that shape you? Because you've got an interesting life story as an adult. You didn't get married until pretty late [00:02:00] on in life. How did all of that shape your story?

Joan Farley: A lot of it was that I knew that there was a big world out there. So unlike a lot of people, I was not going to just stay put in one location for the rest of my life. Even though that is the way God leads many people to live their lives. But for me it meant, now God, where? And that's what I asked at every juncture in my life. Where do you want me to go next?

And I just walked through the first open door, wherever it was, whether that was Mexico, which was first, then Guatemala, then the Philippines, then back to the States, then I got married.

When I got married, my husband really thought that we would end up somewhere south or abroad, but we ended up in Maine and that when we joined a mission, [00:03:00] he had always told me when I retire, we're gonna become missionaries because he figured why not have the government fund your missionary endeavors?

Jim Brangenberg: I agree. Fully funded missionary. Absolutely. Now your husband's name is Charles, right? All right, so Maine, that was quite - you look at all the different places you've lived and then you get sent to Maine. That was quite a difference.

Joan Farley: It was. Fortunately, he was born and raised in Connecticut, and so he was able to say to everybody up here, I am a true Yankee, which mattered to some people, and so it was good. I'm a I don't know what I am person.

Jim Brangenberg: You're a mutt. You've been everywhere. You don't have one place you call home yet. You called our fellow place of Minneapolis was a home for some time, and you had an interesting time where you actually worked at Bethlehem Baptist Church with John [00:04:00] Piper. That must have been an interesting experience. Talk to us about that a little bit.

Joan Farley: It was. Those were good years. I was still single and able to invest all of my time. In fact, I figured I was probably working at least 80 hours a week. And why not? You're single. Why not give it all? And so I had the former minister for children, children's discipleship, that was the title they gave it, was still in the church. And she, in some ways became a mentor to me.

And one of the things I really appreciated about her is she never seemed old, even though she was old enough to be my mom, because she was so active and involved and willing to listen. And she was a great mentor. And then of course, sitting under the ministry of Piper was also good for my soul and that was, it really helped [00:05:00] ground me and stabilized me as far as my theological mindset.

Jim Brangenberg: I was gonna say, would've given you heavy duty. No light conversations with John Piper. I mean his books make my head start to smoke. (laughter) yeah, it's good stuff. What an incredible journey.

So when you and Charles got married and then moved to Maine, and you guys were talking about retirement being missionaries, what did you actually think retirement would look like for you?

Joan Farley: I had no idea. I had been a missionary, so I knew what that looked like, but he is very much a teacher. So I knew that was going to be part of the picture. While we were there, we went on a missions trip with the organization that we are now with to the Dominican Republic. And in the Dominican Republic, it was nonstop ministry.

He preached three times on Sunday. Every night of the week it was six o'clock [00:06:00] to 10 o'clock teaching, and so two Sundays and that all week. And then Saturday he was speaking at a youth rally and they got him on local television and so when we flew out of there, went back home, he said, that's the best vacation I've ever had.

Jim Brangenberg: Wow. Now, is Charles pretty good in Spanish then, or?

Joan Farley: No, he had to use the translator and there are some very good interpreters there in the Dominican Republic.

Jim Brangenberg: Wow. Yeah. That's incredible. So that's what you experienced while you were still working in Maine and now you, so you decided to get sent from that same organization?

Joan Farley: Yes. And so when we had another missionary from them come in and I leaned over and I said, that sounds like your kind of ministry, because it's basically going where you're asked to go and teach. [00:07:00] And I knew that he is not one that thrives unless there's some new challenge. So this would be a constant, pretty much new challenge every time.

And so it's been really good to watch him. He had a stroke five years ago, very debilitating, paralyzed on one side, and I didn't know at the time if that was going to be the rest of my life, was caring for him. But God in his supreme ability allowed him to have an almost complete recovery. And so he is back to teaching again, but it takes him two or three times as long to prepare.

Jim Brangenberg: Oh, sure.

Joan Farley: He said to a pastor after, it was probably several months after the stroke, I'm back to doing everything I can, that I used to do, except I can't talk, and I can't write and I can't read.

Jim Brangenberg: Wow.

Joan Farley: Pastor, that's everything.

Jim Brangenberg: Yeah. [00:08:00] So your life has looked different than what you expected it to look in retirement, yet it sounds like you're having a good time.

Joan Farley: We're there are times when of course, you get weary and you have to remind yourself to keep pressing on. One of the stories that you probably heard Piper tell is the story of the sea shells. Anyway he read this article in reader's Digest I think about this couple who had retired to Florida and the article asked her what she was doing with her retirement, and she went in and showed him her collection of seashells.

And Piper basically got angry and told the church, can you imagine gonna God at the end of your life? And he says, what did you do with your retirement? And you say, look God, see my sea shells!

And [00:09:00] that made a profound impact on me too, to say I don't wanna just coast, and yeah, life has gotten harder, especially for my husband. And we're now caring for my 99-year-old mother, which also adds the complication because every time we are asked to go on a trip, we have to figure out who's gonna come and stay with her.

And yeah, it's not easy, but I don't wanna get to heaven and say, look God, at my collection of books I've read or whatever, or your sea shell collection.

Jim Brangenberg: You did spend some time along the beaches in Trinidad and Tobago. Now, and we lived in Florida. Martha and I lived in Florida for 20 years in a couple of different retirement neighborhoods, and we were in our thirties and forties and early fifties.

And I will tell you, those people that collected seashells are miserable. They're lacking purpose. Not only do they live in purgatory on earth, in a homeowner's association, because that is exactly what that is, they're just miserable. Because they [00:10:00] have no purpose and the life that you and Charles are leading with the crazy travel and doing all the teaching, it's fantastic.

What I love is that God has taken your love for ministry and discipleship and children's discipleship that you were involved in. And God said, hey Joan. I want you to write a book. I want you to write a book, and the book is entitled, Letters to Cassie. How did that come about? Because you've done writing, you've done curriculum, as you told me off the air.

You've done a lot of curriculum, you've done a lot of stuff like that, but a fiction book - that probably wasn't what you expected to be writing in your retirement years.

Joan Farley: It was not. When I was in high school and boarding school in Venezuela, I ran across a book in the library that was a fiction book. And it was a book about, it was mostly conversations between a mother and her daughter, if I remember correctly, and I was missing my mom. So these were good. This was a good book to read. [00:11:00] And in that book was a Bible study method that basically helped me in my spiritual growth, probably more than any single thing.

And so I ran across the same book years later. I found it in a church library and put it back and said, okay, this book doesn't work anymore because it was outdated. It was written in the fifties and didn't face the challenges that teens have today.

Jim Brangenberg: That's for sure.

Joan Farley: I was thinking about that one day after we were living in Georgia, after we had started with our current ministry, and I said to myself, could I write a book that had an impact spiritually on teens the way that book had on me?

And so I said lemme just sit down and see what it's like. Charlie was gone on a trip somewhere, [00:12:00] see what it's like to just write a little bit of fiction, so I sat down probably about nine o'clock in the morning and about four o'clock in the afternoon got up and said, that was fun. I guess I could do this. But of course, that was nine years ago I started that. It took a long time for the book to come to fruition.

Jim Brangenberg: This book, Letters to Cassie, you sent me a copy. I said send me a copy. I'd like to read it. What I loved about it is this is a story of Cassie, whose mom was dying for an entire year of, I don't even remember the disease now, but cancer, I believe it was.

And she was dying and her mom knew that Cassie was heading into her most formative years, the last years of high school. And so she wrote her challenging letters that would be released after she died, of things that she needed to really work on in her life. And they were released to her one letter at a time from her dad and, it was [00:13:00] the heart in those letters that Cassie's mom wrote to her was amazing.

And it is really, in real life, it's the things that most of us need to work on and overcome. Certainly people that are shy, but you captured that relationship, mother -daughter, incredibly well. And it did deal with current issues because kids today deal with issues that are so different than what we dealt with in high school. Just the cell phone thing is so ridiculous. But that you had Cassie lead a small group in her high school youth group and minister and disciple to those girls that were underneath her, it's a great story.

I totally recommend that everybody buy a copy for their granddaughters for Christmas coming up this year or for their birthday this year. Where can people get a copy of Letters to Cassie? Where can they get a copy?

Joan Farley: It's available on Amazon. That's the easiest way to get it.

Jim Brangenberg: And it is a book I highly recommend. When [00:14:00] you wrote that book - I don't know, do you have daughters? Did you ever get to have kids? You and Charlie?

Joan Farley: We did not.

Jim Brangenberg: Okay. When you get married at 43. I didn't know if there was any miracle children. That's all.

Joan Farley: Yeah. And we tried to adopt and birth mothers tended to look at us as grandparent age rather than parent age. So that didn't work either. But I've always enjoyed teenagers. There's just so much energy there and they are under appreciated, I think, in a lot of churches today. And so I just wanted to encourage them and not just teens, but young adults, college age. I get a lot of college age readers reading.

Jim Brangenberg: Oh I highly recommend it. I hope that people will grab it. I hope you sell a million copies because it really will touch people. And it'll help fully fund your ministry years, the remaining years that you've got. If your mom's 99 means you got a lot more years ahead of you. If Mom's 99, it means you're heading, you [00:15:00] got quite a few ahead of you.

Joan Farley: Yeah, she reminds me of that. And I've said, oh, I don't wanna live to be that age because I don't have children and grandchildren to

Jim Brangenberg: take care of you. You better start working on adopting some now. You can always adopt some adult children.

So let's just get personal for a minute before we close out today's interview. What have you learned about how God created you during these, in the beginning, you're still in the beginning of your retirement years, so what have you learned about how God created you?

Joan Farley: I think one of the things that retirement especially has shown me is that God is not done with developing new skills. And so when I was in high school, I was asked to write an ongoing story for the school newspaper, but that was the last time I touched fiction. And to realize that [00:16:00] God can use something and bring it back and bring it back to life is an amazing thing. I think the other thing that God has shown me is that there's still more.

Jim Brangenberg: What do you mean there's still more? What do you mean?

Joan Farley: There's still more that he might want to develop. It was funny. This tends to happen when my husband's gone for a while. One day I decided to make my mother a present for her birthday, and so I got an easel and some paints and went to town and made a sign for her bedroom, which shortly after my father had passed away, that says mercies are new every morning.

My sister took a look at it and said, I didn't know you knew how to paint. It was my first attempt.

Jim Brangenberg: You said, I didn't know I could paint either. Do you remember those the buttons that we had back in the seventies? It, it was all initials and it was, please be patient. God's not finished with me yet.

Do you remember that button? Yep. Yep. And that's really, to be able to say that, you've entered into your seventh decade [00:17:00] or going in, you're in your seventies. And to say that, Hey, God's not done yet. He's still working on stuff in me. That's incredible. Is that encouraging to you that God's not done shaping you?

Joan Farley: It is. It is very encouraging. Yeah. Sometimes I run into people who look back and are sorrowful for the things that go right, but I tend to not wanna be there. I wanna keep looking forward because yeah, there are things that we might regret and things that didn't happen, but there's still the future and we only have today.

Jim Brangenberg: That's right. We only have today. Alright, so for those of you, for those that are listening today to you, Joan, and they're encouraged that, hey, you've learned that you can paint and you can write fiction, which I encourage everybody, there's a lot of great Christian fiction out there that you can learn from that can also take you to far away places, which is fun.

There's a lot of great Christian fiction authors out there. I highly recommend that you check out that genre. For those listening today, Joan, speak a word of [00:18:00] encouragement to them as they're facing retirement or they're in retirement and they haven't found that purpose yet.

Joan Farley: One of the things I keep reminding myself of is that the only things we take to heaven with us are people. And so regardless of how we do it, we need to be investing in people. Because whether it's people who don't even know about him yet, so we wanna reach out in friendships so that they can learn about him, or it's people who do know him and just need an older person to pour into them and to mentor them and encourage them.

Jim Brangenberg: That's the key. And the next generations are desperately in need of getting fed into from somebody who's got a lot of wisdom, who's been down the road further, certainly in their spiritual walk. And if you go to a church that puts all the old people in one wing and all the young people in another wing, change churches or change your church because we need to be in Sunday school classes with 20 [00:19:00] year olds, 30 year olds, 40 year olds, 50, 60, 70, and 80 year olds all in one same class because we can all learn from each other.

That's what I would say. That's so incredible. Joan Farley, thanks for being on iRetire4Him today, for sharing a little bit of your story. I recommend to everybody, get a copy of Letters to Cassie. It's a story you will love reading, and it's a story you'll love giving to your kids, your grandkids, maybe a teenager you meet at the local restaurant that you eat at.

But Joan, thanks for being with us today.

Joan Farley: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Jim Brangenberg: Alright, you've been listening to iRetire4Him, with your host, Jim Brangenberg. I'm a Christ follower planning my retirement journey because I wanna say when I get to the end that, iRetire4Him.