Everyone tells me I am behind on retirement savings and I lie awake doing arithmetic about being seventy with nothing. How much of my future am I actually supposed to plan for?

“Now also when I am old and grayheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come.”

This psalm is the prayer of an old man, unusual in the Psalter for being written from the far end of life rather than the middle of it. He is not asking for comfort or for wealth. He is asking not to be discarded, and asking that his remaining years still count for something. The fear underneath ageing is often not poverty itself but becoming irrelevant and unseen.

“Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that.”

James writes to scattered Jewish Christians, many of them traders whose whole living depended on confident forecasting. He does not tell them to stop planning, only to stop speaking about the future as though they owned it. The correction is small: add if the Lord will to the plan. That phrase does not weaken planning; it removes the terror of pretending a plan is a guarantee.