Don’t Waste Your Life

Earlier this week, my wife and I met a man named Kenneth.

We met Kenny at a service project near the South Street Seaport.

Kenny is retired and in his fifties. He participates in this project five days a week. Essentially, Kenny spends his days picking up leftover food from corporate cafeterias, bagel shops, universities, or restaurants (to name a few) and delivers it to homeless shelters, food banks, or ministries who provide food for kids whose families are in jail (to name a few).

Kenny was a talkative guy and did his best to make friends with everyone we passed. When we got to the homeless shelter that was our final destination, the guy at the front desk shouted, “Yo, Kenny!” as if his best friend had walked through the door.

As we talked to Kenny, he shared with us that he has never been happier than delivering food from people of excess to people of need. It took his retirement, he says, to finally jolt him into doing something that makes him feel alive.

“I wasted so much time,” he said to Kylie. “Chasing the money. The prestige. This city is filthy in it.”

Kenny has a nominal belief in God, but he is figuring out the Biblical principle of finding life by losing it.

The thing that is sad about Kenny, the thing that makes him a cautionary tale, is that he believed the lie of material success. Worse, he abandoned his values, the things that really matter to him, the things that truly make Kenny Kenny, in order to pursue the fool’s errand of chasing fool’s gold.

Culture has saturated our lives with a set of values that help to benefit those who sit on top of it. The promise is that if we commit to these values, we will be One of Them. The rich. The famous. The successful.

Jim Carrey once said, “I wish everyone could become famous so that everyone could see it isn’t the answer.”

The answer is not the firm measurements of man.

The answer is to match our active pursuits with our deep values. In order to explore what we really ought to be doing, we must explore who we really are. What really matters to us? And Why? Most of us have only explored the shallow and conditioned responses to these questions.

Our new friend Kenny has finally discovered what he was made to do. It took the permission of retirement and the wisdom of advanced experience for him to finally name his values and live out of them.

“It’s never too late,” Kenny said to us today.

Neither is it ever too early. Peace and joy are not reserved for retirement (nor are they guaranteed). If we want to live a truly meaningful life, a truly successful life, a truly victorious life, we must be willing to explore the depths of our values. And refuse any life that sprouts from anything other than its truest findings