Carol runs the food pantry at our church. Back in July she asked if I could show up on Tuesday mornings to help unload the truck: canned goods, bread, the occasional pallet of something the grocery store couldn't sell. I said yes the way you say yes to a favor. Something to fill a Tuesday. Something to feel useful.
I almost didn't go back a second time.
Not because the work was hard. Because somewhere between the third and fourth box of canned beans, a thought crept in that I didn't like: I used to run a department. Now I'm stacking cans. Thirty-two years of decisions, meetings, people reporting to me, and here I was, sweating through a golf shirt in a church basement, doing something a teenager could do.
That's the honest version. I almost let pride talk me out of the one thing that's turned out to matter most this year.
Why I Almost Said No the Second Time
I think a lot of men my age carry some version of this without saying it out loud. We spent decades being needed for our judgment, our experience, our title. Retirement doesn't just take the paycheck. It takes the reason people used to call you first. And when the thing being offered in its place looks like manual labor with no name on the org chart, it's easy to file it under "nice, but not for me."
I nearly did exactly that. I told my wife I probably wouldn't go back. I'd find something more "meaningful." She just looked at me and said, "Meaningful to who?"
I didn't have a good answer.
The Word That Changed How I See Tuesday Mornings
I went back the next week mostly out of stubbornness. And somewhere in that second Tuesday, unloading the same boxes, I remembered a verse I hadn't thought about in years.
“Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms.”
1 Peter 4:10
Stewards. Not volunteers. Not helpers. Stewards: people entrusted with something that isn't theirs, managing it well on behalf of someone else. That word did something to me. It reframed the whole Tuesday. I wasn't doing Carol a favor. I was managing a gift I'd been given (thirty-two years of showing up on time, doing what needed doing, not complaining about the job in front of me) and handing it back to God in a church basement instead of a corner office.
The task hadn't changed. I had.
What the Apostle Paul Says About Not Quitting
There's a verse a few books over that I think about every time my knees complain on the concrete floor:
“Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.”
Galatians 6:9-10
"As we have opportunity." I never had that kind of opportunity when I was working. Tuesday mornings belonged to a calendar full of other people's priorities. Now they belong to me, which means they can finally belong to someone who actually needs them.
I don't say any of this to make unloading canned beans sound more spiritual than it is. Some Tuesdays it's just boxes and my aching back. But I've stopped needing it to feel important. I've started needing it to just be obedient: small, unglamorous, faithful, whether anyone's watching or not.
The Tuesdays I Keep Now
I still show up on Tuesdays. But I've started asking Carol what else needs doing instead of waiting to be assigned a task: a driving lesson for a woman whose car broke down, two hours reading with a kid in the after-school program upstairs. My wife started coming with me in August. We don't talk about it much in the car on the way home. We don't need to.
Here's what I'd ask you, if you're circling something like this yourself: what are you calling a favor that might actually be a calling? What gift did you spend thirty years building that a church basement, a food bank, a hospital waiting room could actually use?
You don't have to have it figured out before you show up. I didn't. I almost didn't show up at all.
God bless,
Paul