When I was a young kid, I lived in Nevada. My family lived in the Las Vegas area from 1962-1967. My backyard was the Nevada desert, and I had lots of wide-open spaces and wonderful places to explore. I loved living in the desert. The views were spectacular—desert vistas with mountains in the distance. Mt. Charleston was the highest mountain, and its snow-capped peak was not far away.
As children of the desert, my friends and I had lots of interesting things to do. We often looked for lizards and other desert creatures. One of these creatures was the ant. Nevada has big ants—lots of big ants—lots of big black ants and lots of big red ants. I would often catch ants and put them into a large glass jar filled with sand and watch them make their homes and tunnels. If you’ve ever kept ants this way, then you know they’re very easy to keep alive. They only require a small amount of food and water.
An interesting phenomenon among ants is that their colonies are divided into different castes that each have different responsibilities. Most ants are worker ants. A worker ant’s main responsibility is to feed the queen and her male ants (whose only function is to mate with the queen). Without the unceasing efforts of the worker ants, the colony would soon die.
King Solomon once said: “Ants are not strong folk, but they prepare their food in the summer.” Solomon’s point is that just as the ant works hard to prepare for the future, so too, we should work hard to prepare for our future. We must work while we’re young because a day is coming when we won’t be able to work. What we do today will determine the quality of life we’ll be able to enjoy in retirement.
Older generations understood the need to prepare for the twilight years of life. Even when they had little money, they still found a way to put away money in savings. They worked hard to earn a pension and to build funds in their social security account. Now that they’re retired, they can drive around in a motorhome with the bumper sticker: “We’re spending our children’s inheritance”.
You may be too young to be concerned about retirement but let me encourage you to be wise as the ants so that like our parents and grandparents, we too will be able to enjoy life in retirement.
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