WALKING BACK PLANS FOR RETIREMENT
Michael Caine is 90, and he says he’s finally retiring from making movies. He announced last month that his new film, The Great Escaper, will be his last. This is the third time Caine has retired, he admits with a laugh in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly. Back in the 1990s, when he’d turned 60, he wasn’t getting many offers for roles, so he thought he would retire—until fellow actor Jack Nickelson talked him out of it. Then in 2021, after the release of Best Sellers, he suggested that movie would be his last role. “There’s not exactly scripts pouring out with a leading man who’s 88,” he wrote at the time. He quickly walked back that claim too. But this time, he says the retirement is real. Instead, he wants to concentrate on writing books. “I’m very happy with that because it’s something I can do without walking. All you need is a chair and a pencil and paper.”
WALKING BACK A GOSPEL STANCE
In the early church, especially in churches with both Jewish and Gentile believers, there was much that had to be figured out regarding what, if anything, non-Jewish Christians had to “add to their faith” to be believers, and what, if anything, Jewish believers no longer had to observe from their religious traditions. On at least one occasion, it seems that Peter affirmed the freedoms of Gentile converts … until certain conservative Jewish believers came down from Jerusalem to Antioch. Around these men, Peter walked back his behaviors, putting on a more traditional and “Jewish” manner of living. In today’s passage, Paul tells about how he called Peter out for this hypocrisy, because of the damage it could do to the faith of non-Jewish Christians.
Questions
- Which paying jobs could you still be doing if, by God’s grace, you reach the age of 90?
- What’s a major life decision you (or someone you know) changed your mind about?
- Why do we sometimes change our behavior when we’re around certain people?
