Somewhere along the way, I stopped trying to keep up with what’s going on in the world and discovered that a quieter life might be exactly what God had in mind for me all along.
“Wow, look at that headline,” I said to a buddy one Monday night after dinner.
It indicated that a 65-year-old who retires in 2026 may spend an average of $185,000 on health and medical expenses in retirement over the course of their remaining years.
“And that’s why I don’t watch the news,” my 90-year-old friend said. “Is it all like that?”
I didn’t have the heart tell him that this was one of the tamer stories – it gets way worse if you stick around too long, which is one of the reasons I checked out many years ago.
It’s a course correction that resulted from a mindset shift in my late thirties and early forties when I was heavily involved in politics and wanting to play a small part in changing the world.
Then my health went south, my finances took a nosedive, and I stepped into caregiving roles. Keeping up with the news or trying to change the world no longer felt doable. Unplugging felt like self-preservation at that point.
I mean, who needs to constantly hear bad news all the time anyway?
Over time, I embraced 1 Thessalonians 4:11 (ESV): “Aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one.”
The context for this verse is the apostle Paul encouraging Christians in Thessalonica to continue showing brotherly love to fellow believers throughout Macedonia. So, he wasn’t telling them to become a hermit. In fact, his instruction to “live quietly” comes immediately after his command to love others more and more.
I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds here because this is an essay not a Bible study. But that concept of living a quiet life resonated (and continues to resonate) with me. And I think it’s what keeps me from plugging in again.
Living quietly isn’t simply about escaping the noise or someone else’s insistence that I do something about the thing he or she is upset about. It’s about making room for something better.
Loving the people God has placed around me, living quietly, minding my own business and working with my hands feels like plenty for this lifetime.
