Sunday, February 06, 2011

Greetings from the Twilight Zone!

The Career Twilight Zone, that is. In fact, I've been living there for 15 years, according to a NYT columnist. (What would we do without the NYT? Look at the woman in the photo. Does one wonder that she remains unemployed?)

Yesterday we had a visit from David Bridgman, who is going mighty, mighty strong at age 78. (He left our church after some hard feelings about whether we should leave the PCUSA after serving as our pastor 16 or so years ago. We were on the other side of his view that we should stay in, which we did by a few votes. He was right, and we've told him so.) He would have been about 61 or 62 at that point.

Carol started her outside-the-home career at age 50. My firm let me go when I was age 53, and we had two children still in college.

Glenn Reynolds linked to the NYT article that I cite above. I like the comment of a Greg Joyce to Glenn's post, which Glenn hoisted into his post:

And reader Greg Joyce emails: “I’m guessing your tongue is in cheek when you say more age discrimination suits are needed to help the unemployed over 50. I’m on the wrong side of 50 and was recently laid off when our hi-tech company closed shop. If someone doesn’t want to hire me because of my age, that should be their right. Whatever, I started my own company. Job security is a myth anyway.

(Now to get preachy, and, of course, I never do that.) I would add, finally, that in God's economy at whatever age those among his people might be, we are all on the right side of 50. God has a full employment plan. My dad, stricken with heart disease and a virtual shut in for the last three years of his life, remained in service. He told me he spent his days reading the Bible, praying for his family and others, and talking to my mother (who said that the last three years with him were among the happiest of their marriage.) This was not how Dad had lived the first 80 years of his life - from about age 14 he was always, always working very hard "outside the home."

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