There comes a point in every race when the finish matters more.
At the beginning, attention naturally turns toward what lies ahead. Somewhere in the middle, the challenge becomes endurance. There are stretches when progress feels strong and others when simply continuing requires more effort than expected. Eventually, however, the distance already traveled exceeds the distance likely remaining, and the question begins to shift.
The runner is no longer asking how the race will start.
He is asking how he will finish it.
That is where we have arrived.
We began this book by acknowledging something most of us know but rarely consider carefully: our days are numbered. We do not know the number, nor do we need to. Moses did not ask God to reveal how many days remained. He asked for wisdom to number the days he had been given.
From there, we looked back without letting the past become our home. We considered regret and grace, separated identity from accomplishment, and took inventory of what God has entrusted to us. We examined what enough might look like, returned to our walk with Jesus, and considered our marriages, families, bodies, work, money, relationships, wisdom, testimony, and influence. Finally, we asked what faithful service might require next.
Those questions have brought us here.
When the remaining years become the completed years, what will it mean to have lived them well?
Scripture gives us a word worth carrying into whatever time remains.
Faithful.
Paul’s Final Perspective
As his life drew to a close, Paul wrote to Timothy:
“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith.” — 2 Timothy 4:7 (NASB 2020)
Those words carry weight because we know something about the life behind them.
Paul’s course had not been easy. His ministry brought extraordinary fruitfulness, but it also brought rejection, imprisonment, beatings, opposition, physical suffering, danger, disappointment, and even people who abandoned him. He knew what it meant to pray for an affliction to be removed and to receive sustaining grace instead. He knew what it meant to carry responsibility for churches while recognizing that their growth ultimately belonged to God.
Yet as he approached the end, Paul did not summarize his life by listing how many churches he had helped establish, how many people had heard him preach, how many letters he had written, or the extent of his influence.
He spoke about the fight.
The course.
The faith.
He continued with Jesus.
There is freedom in that standard because results are never fully within our control. We can work diligently, love sacrificially, teach carefully, and give generously, yet still face outcomes we did not anticipate. People make their own decisions. Bodies become ill. Organizations change. Relationships sometimes remain unresolved despite sincere efforts toward peace.
Faithfulness is not the ability to control those outcomes.
It is continuing to trust and obey Jesus in the life we have actually been given.
Your Course Is Your Course
Paul spoke about completing the course.
That distinction matters because comparison can lead us to believe we should be running someone else’s race rather than our own.
Throughout this book, we have repeatedly returned to the truth that God has not entrusted the same life to everyone. Some people have substantial financial resources, while others do not. Some possess public influence, while others influence only a few people deeply. Some remain physically strong late in life, while others live faithfully despite unexpected limitations.
Some careers achieve extraordinary success.
Others end unexpectedly.
Some families appear remarkably healthy.
Others include wounds, estrangement, disability, addiction, grief, or circumstances no parent would ever choose.
If faithfulness required identical outcomes, most of us would spend our remaining years trying to become someone God never asked us to be.
Hebrews offers us another picture:
“Therefore, since we also have such a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let’s rid ourselves of every obstacle and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let’s run with endurance the race that is set before us.” — Hebrews 12:1 (NASB 2020)
The race set before us.
Your responsibility is not to finish my race, nor is mine to finish yours. We can learn from and encourage one another, and run alongside one another for parts of the journey. Yet God has placed specific people, opportunities, limitations, resources, experiences, and responsibilities before each of us.
Faithfulness begins with accepting the course we have actually been given.
That includes accepting that the course may change.
Your health may affect what you can do. A spouse may need care. Work may end sooner than expected. Financial circumstances may require you to work longer than planned. A new opportunity may arise, or something you expected to pursue may quietly disappear.
The Remaining Years Plan cannot guarantee the course.
It can help you stay attentive to the One you are following.
Finishing Faithfully Does Not Mean Finishing Perfectly
There is a danger in reaching the end of a book like this one.
After examining sixteen chapters of your life, you might close these pages believing you now need to execute the perfect second half.
You need to become a better husband immediately, repair every family relationship, improve your health, optimize your work, organize your finances, deepen every friendship, mentor younger people, document your testimony, discover your next assignment, and follow your Remaining Years Plan without drifting from it.
If that is what you have heard, something needs to be corrected before we proceed further.
You are going to fail at some of this.
So am I.
There will be mornings when we know what matters yet still give our attention to something less important. There will be conversations we handle poorly, opportunities we miss, commitments we make and struggle to keep, and seasons when our priorities drift.
We may once again become overly focused on work.
We may worry about money.
We may grow impatient with those we love.
We may postpone something we know we should do.
We may discover six months from now that the assignment we thought was right for us needs to be revised.
None of that means the journey has failed.
The Christian life has never been about executing a flawless plan.
It is about following a perfect Savior.
That distinction is everything.
Grace Is Not Only Where We Begin
We established early in this book that grace comes first, and faithfulness follows.
Our faithfulness is not the basis of our salvation; Christ’s faithfulness and finished work are. We seek to finish faithfully because we belong to Him, not to persuade Him to receive us. The grace that welcomed us through Christ is the grace on which we still depend.
We need that truth just as much at the end as at the beginning.
Christians understand that salvation is by grace, yet we sometimes live as though grace matters less once we know what we should do. We receive grace when we come to Jesus, and then quietly build a life in which we expect ourselves to perform well enough that we need little more of it.
But we never outgrow our need for grace.
The same Jesus who restored Peter continued to shape him. The same Paul who wrote about finishing the course acknowledged that he had not yet reached perfection but kept pressing forward toward Christ (Philippians 3:12–14).
Christian maturity does not mean reaching a point where we no longer need forgiveness, correction, help, or dependence on God.
If anything, maturity makes us more aware of how deeply we need them.
Paul held effort and dependence together in a single sentence: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to desire and to work for His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12–13, NASB 2020).
We work.
God is at work in us.
The second truth is why the first is possible.
That should make the Remaining Years Plan encouraging rather than oppressive.
The plan is a tool.
Jesus is the Savior.
When you drift, return.
When you sin, repent.
When you hurt someone, take responsibility.
When you feel discouraged, remember grace.
When circumstances change, adjust the plan.
When God closes a door you expected to remain open, bring your disappointment to Him and reconsider the assignment.
Faithfulness does not mean never straying from the path.
Sometimes faithfulness means recognizing we have wandered and turning back to Jesus.
There Is Still Time
Perhaps you have reached this chapter with a quiet sense of regret.
You wish you had considered these matters twenty years ago.
Maybe you wish you had been more intentional about your marriage when your children were young. Perhaps you wish you had managed your finances differently, cared for your health more consistently, invested more deeply in your friendships, or spent less of your life trying to prove yourself professionally.
There may be things you would change if you could.
We addressed regret early in this book because the past can teach us without becoming our home.
Now, near the end, I want to say something equally important.
There is still time.
I do not mean you are guaranteed another decade. Chapter 1 established that none of us knows how much time is left.
I mean that today remains.
If your wife is beside you, there is still time to love her more intentionally.
If your adult child is willing to talk, there is still time to listen.
If a relationship can be repaired, there may still be time to take responsibility for your role.
If God has entrusted you with financial resources, there is still time to be more intentional and generous in how you use them.
If you possess wisdom that someone else welcomes, there is still time to share it.
If your body allows you to make a reasonable change, there is still time to start.
If there is a story about God’s faithfulness your family has never heard, there is still time to preserve it.
If God has placed an assignment before you, there is still time to take the next step of faith.
We cannot recover yesterday.
We do not need yesterday to obey Jesus today.
That is good news.
Your Most Meaningful Contribution May Still Be Ahead
Our culture often describes aging primarily as a process of decline. We grow, peak, and then gradually become less relevant until we eventually fade from the places where important things happen.
There are physical realities of aging that should not be denied. We have considered them honestly. Strength, energy, and opportunity change. Some doors close permanently.
But usefulness and youth are not the same thing.
The psalmist says of the righteous, “They will still yield fruit in advanced age; they will be full of sap and very green, to declare that the LORD is just” (Psalm 92:14–15, NASB 2020).
Fruit in advanced age.
Scripture gives us a beautiful picture of it.
A sixty-five-year-old may not have the energy he had at thirty-five, but he may have thirty more years of judgment.
A seventy-year-old may no longer want to work sixty hours a week, but he may recognize, in ten minutes, a problem that someone younger could spend months learning to see.
A grandfather may no longer hold the professional authority he once had, but he may have access to a grandchild’s heart that no executive title could ever provide.
A retired man may have less income than he had during his career, yet more discretionary time than he has had since childhood.
Later life does not merely diminish capacity.
It changes capacity.
That is why some of our most meaningful contributions may still be ahead.
Not necessarily our most visible contributions.
Our most meaningful ones.
Perhaps one of the most important things you do professionally is to prepare someone else to lead.
Perhaps your greatest contribution to your family will come after your children become adults.
Maybe your most significant act of generosity will occur after you stop accumulating.
Perhaps the story of God’s faithfulness that most affects your grandchildren is one you have not yet shared with them.
Maybe the younger man you encourage will eventually help people you never meet.
You do not know.
Neither do I.
That uncertainty should not discourage us.
It should keep us accessible.
Faithfulness May Become Quieter
There is another possibility we should consider.
Your most active years may already be past.
For some readers, physical strength will decline substantially. Illness may limit travel or service. Memory may eventually become less reliable. A man who spent decades caring for others may increasingly become the one receiving care.
Does faithfulness become less possible then?
No.
Its expression changes.
The man confined to a chair can still belong fully to Christ. The husband who allows his wife or children to help him may be learning humility that independence never demanded of him. A man whose strength has gone may still receive love with gratitude, pray when he can, encourage when he is able, and trust Jesus when there is very little left for him to control.
And there may come a time when even those things become difficult.
His worth does not disappear.
This is why we have resisted defining faithfulness as productivity throughout this book.
The Christian hope is not that we will remain impressive until our last breath.
It is that Christ will remain faithful even when our strength fails.
Paul expressed confidence that “He who began a good work among you will complete it by the day of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 1:6, NASB 2020). He was writing to the Philippian believers, giving thanks for their partnership in the gospel. His confidence concerned the work God had begun among that church, not merely the completion of an individual’s plans (Philippians 1:3–7).
Jude ends his letter by praising God “who is able to protect you from stumbling and to make you stand in the presence of His glory, blameless with great joy” (Jude 24, NASB 2020).
Finishing faithfully is our aim, yet our confidence ultimately rests in the God who keeps His people.
Our perseverance depends upon His gracious work in us.
The One who began it is able to keep us.
Success Is Not the Finish Line
The world offers us many ways to measure whether a life has been successful.
Net worth.
Career accomplishment.
Recognition.
Influence.
Possessions.
Experiences.
Awards.
Titles.
Some of those things may represent genuine accomplishment and faithful work. There is no need to pretend they are meaningless.
They are unable to provide the final measurement.
Jesus told a parable about servants entrusted with their master’s possessions. When the master returned, the commendation given to the servants who had responded faithfully was:
“Well done, good and faithful slave.” — Matthew 25:21 (NASB 2020)
Faithful.
That is the word I want us to carry.
Imagine reaching the end of life having accumulated less than someone else, yet having been faithful with what God entrusted to you.
Imagine never becoming widely known, yet loving your wife faithfully, investing in your family, giving generously within your means, serving others, sharing wisdom, and following Jesus.
Imagine discovering that some of the things you thought would define your life mattered far less than the people you loved along the way.
Would that be enough?
The goal is not to build a life that prompts everyone else to say, “Well done.”
We live before the One whose judgment ultimately matters.
Jesus > Others > Self
We have used this order throughout the book because it offers a simple way to examine complex decisions:
Jesus > Others > Self
As we finish, I want to make it clear what that does and does not mean.
It does not mean the self is worthless.
You bear God’s image. Your health matters. Your rest matters. Your growth matters. There are legitimate desires and joys God has given you, and receiving those gifts with gratitude is not selfish.
Putting oneself last means one is no longer the lord.
Jesus occupies that place.
When Jesus is first, He changes how we see everything else. We learn that greatness can look like service, that leadership can mean washing feet, that forgiveness is stronger than retaliation, and that love willingly gives itself for another’s good.
That naturally turns us toward others.
Marriage becomes a place for practicing sacrificial love.
Family becomes an opportunity to encourage faith and pass it down.
Work becomes a place to serve and develop people.
Money becomes a resource rather than a master.
Wisdom becomes something to share.
Influence becomes an opportunity to point beyond ourselves.
Our story becomes a testimony to what God has done.
Even our next assignment becomes less about proving we still matter and more about asking where we can serve faithfully.
This is more than a strategy for aging well.
It is the character of Jesus that increasingly shapes how we live.
Fixing Our Eyes on Jesus
Hebrews does not merely tell us to run with endurance.
It tells us where to look:
“Looking only at Jesus, the originator and perfecter of the faith.” — Hebrews 12:2 (NASB 2020)
That may be the most important instruction in the book.
If we focus primarily on the Remaining Years Plan, we will eventually become discouraged.
If we fix our eyes on others, comparison will return.
If we fix our eyes on our failures, regret will return.
If we fix our eyes on our accomplishments, pride will return.
If we fix our eyes only on the future, anxiety may return.
So we look elsewhere.
We look to Jesus.
We remember the One who loved us before we had anything impressive to offer Him. We remember the One who served, forgave, welcomed those others overlooked, spoke the truth, showed compassion, washed feet, and ultimately gave Himself up for us.
We remember the cross.
We remember the empty tomb.
And we remember that our hope for the future is not ultimately that we will write an extraordinary final chapter.
Our hope is Christ.
The Remaining Years Commitment
Throughout this book, you have been building a plan. In the section that follows this chapter, you will bring its pieces together.
Before doing that, I want you to make a different kind of commitment.
Not a contract promising perfection.
Not a promise that circumstances will remain the same.
Not another standard to condemn yourself for falling short.
Not a vow that binds you to an outcome you cannot guarantee.
This is a statement of direction—a way to articulate the kind of man you want to become and the One you intend to follow.
Read it slowly. Change the wording as needed so that what you sign is truly yours.
My Remaining Years Commitment
By God’s grace, for as many years as He grants me, I want my life to increasingly reflect the character of Jesus Christ.
I will seek to remain in Him through His Word, prayer, and the fellowship of His church, relying on His Spirit rather than on my own resolve.
I recognize that my time, relationships, resources, abilities, experience, wisdom, opportunities, and influence ultimately belong to God. They have been entrusted to me for a season, and I intend to steward them faithfully.
I will seek Jesus before success and obedience before recognition. I will remember that my identity is not defined by my title, possessions, accomplishments, failures, or others’ approval. My life belongs to Christ.
If I am married, I will seek to love my wife sacrificially and intentionally, remembering that familiarity should never excuse neglectful behavior.
I will seek to love my family without trying to control what is theirs. I will offer wisdom when it is welcome and appropriate, remain available, listen, apologize when I am wrong, share what God has done, and trust Him with the parts of their stories I cannot control.
I will care for my body responsibly, neither worshipping health nor fearing age. I will seek to remain available for whatever service God allows, accepting limitations with grace when they arise.
I will work diligently without letting my work define me. As my responsibilities change, I will seek appropriate opportunities to share what I have learned rather than assuming my experience must remain centered on me.
I will treat money as a resource entrusted to me by God rather than as the source of my security. I will provide responsibly, enjoy gratefully, prepare wisely, and give generously in keeping with the resources and responsibilities He has placed before me.
I will invest in relationships. I will make room for people, pursue reconciliation when possible and appropriate, and allow trusted people to know me beyond the version of myself I present publicly.
I will share wisdom rather than assume that what took me decades to learn should remain with me. I will look for those coming behind me and invest in them without expecting them to become copies of me, remembering that the goal is not to make them more like me but to help point them toward Jesus.
I will tell the story of God’s faithfulness. I will not hide every failure or reshape my history to make myself always look wise. I want the people who hear my story to understand not how impressive I was, but how patient, merciful, gracious, and faithful God has been.
I will remain available for my next assignment, whether it is large or small, public or private, exciting or ordinary. I will resist the temptation to judge its importance by how many people notice it.
And when I fail in these commitments, I will not hide from God in shame. I will return to Jesus, receive His grace, repent where necessary, make things right as much as I reasonably can, and continue following Him.
I do not make these commitments to earn God’s love.
I make them because I have received, in Jesus Christ, a love I could never earn.
For whatever years remain, this is the order I want my life to increasingly reflect:
Jesus > Others > Self.
Signature: ______________________________________
Date: __________________________________________
What Faithfulness Looks Like Now
A commitment becomes meaningful when it begins to shape ordinary decisions.
Most of us will not live out the commitments above through a handful of dramatic moments. We will live them out on Tuesdays, through conversations at breakfast, decisions at work, ordinary evenings with our wives, phone calls with our children, opportunities to give, choices about our health, and moments when someone needs our attention at an inconvenient time.
Faithfulness is usually far less dramatic than we expect.
It may mean putting the phone down when your wife begins telling you something you have heard before, and deciding that loving her is more important than whatever is on the screen. It may mean listening to an adult child without immediately telling him what to do. It may mean going to the medical appointment you have postponed, not because you are afraid of dying, but because caring for your body responsibly is part of staying available to the people you love.
Faithfulness may look like reviewing your finances with your wife and finally deciding together what “enough” means. It may also mean increasing your generosity, repairing a relationship, or admitting that you have allowed work to take up space it no longer deserves.
Perhaps it will mean inviting a younger man to breakfast and beginning a relationship that never becomes formal enough to be called mentoring but that changes both of you over time.
Perhaps faithfulness will require saying no.
No to another opportunity.
No to the need to stay important.
No to the temptation to control your adult children.
No to the belief that slowing down equates to becoming irrelevant.
No to the voice that tells you your failures have disqualified you from being useful to God.
And perhaps one of the most important expressions of faithfulness will simply be continuing to follow Jesus even when the circumstances of your life do not look the way you hoped they would.
We sometimes imagine faithfulness as a heroic finish.
More often, it is ordinary obedience sustained over a long time.
You Are Not Finished Because the Plan Changes
There is something else I hope you will remember when you return to the Remaining Years Plan you are about to complete.
It will change.
It should.
The plan you write today reflects what you know now. Five years from now, your circumstances may be different. Your health may change. Your financial situation may change. A child may need you in ways you cannot anticipate. Your work may end sooner than expected or continue longer than you imagined. A relationship may be restored. Someone you love may die. A new opportunity may appear that is not visible from where you stand today.
Do not confuse changing the plan with forsaking faithfulness.
The objective was never to predict your remaining years precisely.
The objective is to steward them faithfully upon their arrival.
There may be assignments you believe are ahead of you that never materialize. There may be assignments you cannot yet imagine that ultimately become some of the most meaningful work of your life.
Hold the plan seriously.
Hold Jesus more tightly.
If the plan and His direction ever appear to diverge, the plan is the one that changes.
When the Remaining Years Become Fewer
If God gives us enough time, the language of this book will eventually become more literal.
The remaining years will decrease.
Physical capacity may decline. Independence may change. Some of the things we spent decades doing will eventually be done for the last time, though we may not recognize the moment it happens.
There will be a final day on the job.
A final long trip.
A final time driving somewhere alone.
Perhaps a final time lifting a grandchild who has grown too big to carry.
Life contains many last times that pass without announcing themselves.
That reality could make us fearful.
I hope instead it makes us present.
If we understand that ordinary moments do not last forever, perhaps we become more grateful for them while they are present.
The dinner with your wife is important.
The phone call matters.
Sunday morning matters.
The conversation with a friend is important.
The grandchild asking the same question for the fourth time is important.
The ability to walk outside, drive somewhere, work, worship with other believers, help others, or sit across the table from the people we love matters.
Not because every ordinary moment needs to become emotionally profound.
Because ordinary life is where most of life happens.
Numbering our days teaches us to stop waiting for extraordinary circumstances before we become grateful for the ones God has already given us.
What If Your Remaining Years Are Hard?
There is one more truth we should acknowledge before we conclude.
Nothing in this book promises that the remaining years will be easy.
They may hold tremendous joy. I hope they do.
There may be travel, grandchildren, meaningful work, financial freedom, a deeper marriage, strong friendships, ministry, laughter, and opportunities you cannot yet imagine.
There may also be loss.
People we love will age alongside us. Some will become ill. Some will die. Our bodies may develop limitations we never chose. Financial plans may be tested by circumstances no spreadsheet could predict. Children may make decisions that break our hearts. Friends may move away. Careers may end differently than we hoped.
Following Jesus does not exempt us from any of those things.
But hardship does not render faithfulness impossible.
Some of the most powerful testimony we leave may come not from what God allowed us to accomplish in our strongest years but from how we trusted Him in our weakest.
People are watching how we age.
Our children are watching.
Our grandchildren may be watching.
People newer to the faith are watching.
They do not need to see men who have never hurt.
They need to see what it looks like when a man is hurt yet still trusts in Jesus.
They do not need to see men who are never afraid of anything.
They need to see what it looks like to be afraid yet still trust God.
They do not need a picture of effortless Christianity.
They need to see grace that remains sufficient even when strength fails.
That may become one of the greatest testimonies in the years ahead.
You Are Going Home
There is a reason Christians can think honestly about the end of life without letting the subject turn hopeless.
The finish line is not merely the end.
For the follower of Jesus, death is not the end of the story. To depart is to be with Christ, as Paul desired (Philippians 1:23). Yet Christian hope extends beyond death to Christ’s return, the bodily resurrection of His people, and everlasting life with Him (1 Corinthians 15:20–26, 51–57). We are not merely waiting for our lives to end. We are waiting for Jesus, whose appearing brings the fullness of the life He has promised.
Paul could speak of finishing his course because he knew what lay beyond it. Immediately after declaring that he had fought the good fight, finished the course, and kept the faith, he wrote about the crown of righteousness the Lord would award and about those who have loved His appearing (2 Timothy 4:8).
His confidence was not in his ability to preserve his earthly life.
It was in Christ.
That shifts the emotional center of what we have discussed.
We are not desperately trying to extract enough meaning from our remaining years before time runs out.
We are not racing against death to prove that our lives mattered.
We are not building a legacy because we need people to keep saying our names after we are gone.
Our security is elsewhere entirely.
Through His death and resurrection, Jesus Christ has defeated sin and death, the enemies we could never overcome on our own. Because He lives, those who belong to Him will also live. Death remains an enemy, but it is a defeated one awaiting its final destruction when Christ raises His people (1 Corinthians 15:20–26, 51–57).
The resurrection changes what the finish means.
So, we can live fully without clinging desperately to life.
We can give because what we possess was never our ultimate security.
We can release positions because titles have never defined us.
We can allow younger people to move ahead of us because we do not need to remain at the center.
We can accept aging because youth was never our hope.
We can face death because death does not have the final word.
That is Christian freedom.
And it gives us tremendous freedom to live out the years that remain.
Whatever Remains
When we began this book, we acknowledged that none of us knows how many years remain.
That is still true.
This book has not changed the number.
It was never intended to.
The purpose was to change the way we see whatever number it may be.
Maybe you have thirty years left.
Maybe fifteen.
Maybe five.
None of us know.
But the number does not change the fundamental opportunity inherent in today.
You can follow Jesus today.
You can love someone today.
You can encourage someone, forgive someone, give something, teach something, repair something, or take a single faithful step toward an assignment today.
You can tell others what God has done.
You can put the phone down and listen to your wife.
You can call your child.
You can invite a younger man to breakfast.
You can thank God for the body you have rather than spend another day resenting the body you once had.
You can loosen your grip on something you were never going to keep forever.
You can pray.
You can worship.
You can serve.
None of those things requires knowing how much time is left.
They require us to be faithful with the time we have.
Perhaps that is what Moses understood when he prayed:
“So teach us to number our days, That we may present to You a heart of wisdom.” — Psalm 90:12 (NASB 2020)
Numbering our days was never primarily about calculating how few remain.
It was about becoming wise enough to recognize the value of the one in front of us.
There will come a day when our work here is done. We will leave behind titles, possessions, accounts, schedules, unfinished projects, houses, vehicles, businesses, and things we once believed could not continue without us.
They will continue.
Other people will be in our offices.
Someone else will own what we owned.
Our children will grow older.
Our grandchildren will become adults.
The world will move forward.
What matters is whether we were faithful while these things were ours to steward.
I hope the people closest to us know they were loved.
I hope our wives know that after all these years together, we still choose them.
I hope our children know they can come home to the truth.
I hope our grandchildren know something about Jesus because they knew us.
I hope someone younger is wiser because we gave away what took us decades to learn.
I hope our resources accomplished something beyond making our own lives comfortable.
I hope our friends knew the man behind the public persona.
I hope our families know the stories of God’s faithfulness.
I hope we learned to hold our plans with open hands.
And when our strength eventually fades, I hope our confidence remains where it should have been all along.
In Jesus.
Finish Faithful
You do not need to make the rest of your life spectacular.
You do not have to make up for every mistake you have made.
You do not have to accomplish one final great thing.
You do not need to prove that you still matter.
If you belong to Christ, Jesus settled the deepest question about your identity before we even began this journey.
What remains is stewardship.
Love the people God has given you.
Care for what He has entrusted to you.
Give away what you have learned.
Tell the stories of His faithfulness.
Use your resources wisely.
Remain available.
Take the next assignment when it arrives.
Rest when rest is appropriate.
Repent when you fail.
And at every step, depend on the Holy Spirit to produce in you what determination alone never could. The Father who has provided for you has not left you to finish alone; through His Son and by His Spirit, He continues His gracious work among His people.
Receive grace.
Keep following Jesus.
And someday, when your remaining years have become your completed years, may the story of your life not primarily be that you finished wealthy, powerful, comfortable, famous, or impressive.
May it be something far better.
You fought the good fight.
You finished your course.
You kept the faith.
By the grace of God, you finished faithfully.
The chapters are complete.
But there is one final task to complete.
Throughout these pages, you have been building the individual components of your Remaining Years Plan. You have considered your time, your identity, what God has entrusted to you, what “enough” means, your walk with Jesus, the people you love, your health, work, resources, relationships, wisdom, testimony, and your next assignment.
We are now going to bring those pieces together.
Not into another list of goals.
Into a clear, personal picture of what faithfulness looks like in the life God has given you.
Turn the page.
It is time to build your Remaining Years Plan.