I was reading the preview on today’s Outback Bowl matchup between the Penn State Nittany Lions and the University of Tennessee Volunteers when, as I reached the end of the article, I said to myself, “There they go again, talking about JoePa’s age. I guess it just seems so abnormal by worldly standards to be working when you’re eighty years old, instead of driving a golf cart like *normal* retired-aged people.” Below is how the article quoted Paterno.

“We live in a world where everybody wants to put somebody in a little bottle. Maybe I shouldn’t be coaching at 80. I don’t know,” Paterno said.

“Sometimes I wake up in the morning, sometime in the middle of the night looking at Tennessee tape and I say: ‘What the heck am I doing in this job? I could be sleeping and get up in the morning and walk around the block and not have to worry about it.’ But it’s fun. If I didn’t enjoy it, I’d get out.”

Then I remembered something I had read in chapter three of John Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life (it’s actually on the back cover, too).

I will tell you what a tragedy is. I will show you how to waste your life. Consider a story from the February 1988 edition of Reader’s Digest, which tells about a couple who “took early retirement from their jobs in the Northeast five years ago when he was 59 and she was 51. Now they live in Punta Gorda, Florida, where they cruise on their 30 foot trawler, play softball and collect shells.” At first, when I read it I thought it might be a joke. A spoof on the American Dream. But it wasn’t. Tragically, this was the dream: Come to the end of your life–your one and only precious, God-given life–and let the last great work of your life, before you give an account to your Creator, be this: playing softball and collecting shells. Picture them before Christ at the great day of judgement: “Look, Lord. See my shells.” That is a tragedy. And people today are spending billions of dollars to persuade you to embrace that tragic dream.

More of Piper on Christian Retirement can be found at Desiring God.