An Ending....

As this is scheduled to post around 5:00 pm Central time, I will have ended my adult, full-time working career, whatever that means. In practice it means that by the time you are reading this I will be semi-retired, working only part-time. I have talked about this before here on the blog so if you are one of the regulars, you already know about this. But it is a time of mixed emotions and reflections.

It was 1974 when I started as a full-time pastor of a church. I did that for 30 years, going on a leave of absence ten years ago the end of this month. That was to move into my 2nd career full time. In the previous ten years I had also worked part-time as an addictions counselor so it was time to do that full-time. As I once described it to a group I was training with, at that point I finally paid attention to God's call to do ministry outside the institution of the church. Secular ministry I called it (and still do, even though I do not like the term.) For the past 10 years I have worked full-time in the addictions field working first with middle school youth, then young adults and finally with adults in residential and outpatient settings.

What a ride it has been. In the midst of all that I had some amazing adventures, met and worked with many amazing people. I have loved my work and never felt that I was in the wrong vocation or calling. The call changed, but it was always ministry in the very best, broadest and most profound sense of that much abused word. I like being on the front-lines; that quote over there in the sidebar has never wavered: I want to live and work within a few yards of the gates of hell. One of these days I will write on here about what that has meant to me. But for today, I am semi-leaving part of that behind to begin my third career.

Tomorrow I will talk about that. For today, it feels as if I have taken another important step, led by God's grace and calling. Ministry is not a church-based, church-owned, or even church-defined activity. It is where God calls you. The leading of these past 40 years has been amazing, humbling, always exciting, sometimes frustrating since God doesn't usually do what I want God to do in spite of my prayers and petitions to the contrary. The key is in the 11th step of Alcoholics Anonymous:

Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying ONLY [emph. added] for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry it out.

I have tried to do that to the best of my ability and I have always found the empowerment needed.

I have no doubt about that empowerment and direction into the future.

What Do You Do?

Listening to part of the TED Hour on NPR over the weekend I was a little confused. It was a session on "success" and jobs and the speaker talked about how we often ask others the question of this post:

What do you do?

I wasn't following the whole idea of the talk but he seemed to be saying that this idea that our identity is found in what we do is a modern idea. He talked about how it used to be that you were identified by where you were from.

My first reaction was:

Hmmm. That's interesting.

Then I stopped. I remembered people I've known with names like:

• Miller
• Cooper
• Farmer
• Smith

These are a few of the ones we know from English. My last name is an occupational one from German- a feudal serf or tenant farmer.

Yes, there are also many surnames for places. There are also others that were adopted for different reasons. Many names are simply John's son, etc. One of the dangers in making the kind of all-encompassing statements the speaker made is that they are often wrong.

The differences today, I think, include the fact that we have "free-time" or leisure to do more than just be a miller or farmer. Today we can be more than what we do. We also have the physical ability to live beyond the years of "work" or occupation.

Perhaps today we have to ask what others do because they don't carry it in their name or clothing or the condition of their hands. Perhaps we are now in a post-occupational world where what we do is only part of who we are and in reality no longer defines us.

Which can get confusing.

I have felt that before. First when I went on leave of absence from the church's pastoral ministry and then "retired" from the pastoral ministry. That which defined me for 30 years was done.

Now, 10 years later I am again leaving a full-time occupation behind as I near retirement. As I commented the other day, the grief of that is real. Again, some of my personal definition is changing.

On the other hand I am not sure what it means to answer the title question, What do you do? with:

Nothing. I'm retired.

I find that as incongruous as the old question of asking a "housewife" whether she worked or not? But at the same time answering with some Zen-like comment:

I'm a human being, not a human doing.

is also pretty silly. What do I do? What will I do? As an occupation? As a way of life? As a lifestyle? As a mission? As a vocation? An avocation?

Sure, in the end I am me, but that is also a cop-out for I am me in relation to my family and friends, co-workers and what I do. These all define me. I am not defined in a vacuum. My name, inherited through the centuries from some unknown German serf who needed a last name, does not describe me. Never did.

In the end I guess we each have to make our own name and see where it goes.

Six Weeks

For the past several months I have been posting periodically about the change in my life that will be starting in December. Six weeks from today will be the first day I will NOT have a "full-time" job since, well, I guess it's about 40 years now. On Wednesday December 4 I will switch to a part-time employee as I make the first step of a transition to "retirement" sometime in the next year.

Pieces of the reality of it have begun to settle in, especially as it is now in that 6-week range. I have been talking with my supervisor about clearing out my office space, taking books home, letting people take some of them, pulling the pictures from the walls. Within a few weeks I will no longer be one of the primary group counselors of the program we have been developing for the past 14 or so months.

Six weeks from today I will not have to get up and go to "work" five days a week. Just two, sometimes three as a supplemental.

Reality, even hoped for and planned for reality, can be scary.

Which is why I have been doing some thinking, planning, talking, praying, coaching. In the midst of this I have been led to a book, The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk, and Adventure in the 25 Years after 50 by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot. In her research and interviewing she discovered the revolutionary cultural shift that has been taking place with those of us who used to be called "Senior Citizens" or, before that, the elderly. In the early years of my generation, the elderly DID include people my current age. The Golden Years were already looking tarnished for many. Come to age 65 and you were ready for the "Old Folks' Home."

Oh, how that has changed!

Even the first stage of this revolution, "Retirement Communities" where older people went to sit and play away their final years away from the distractions of young people (i.e. my generation). Oops. Gerontology is now outdated. We aren't riding into some Sun City Sunset. At least not in the ways many saw it 40 years ago. Yes, many of us are "retiring" from our careers, the jobs or callings that have given us pleasure as well as opportunity. But we want something different now.

We want to continue to be useful, but we want to discover new ways to use what we have been given. We want to continue to explore and dig, and relate and learn new things. We want to right wrongs we gave up working on. We want to leave a legacy while still learning new things. Life is too short to sit around the pool and sip lemonade. Sure we will do that, too. But there are books and stories to be written. There are pictures to take and videos to produce. There are bands to play in and music to be discovered. There are people to be mentor- and people still to mentor us in things we have been waiting for.

In short, life is still happening. Or, in the language we might have used 45 years ago-

Life is a-happenin', man.

No, it doesn't start in six weeks for me. It is just a continuation of a lifelong pursuit of life and all it can offer to me- and then to others.

As always, I'll keep you posted.

Three Thoughts on Vocation

I find it interesting that poets, speakers, and preachers all say the same thing. It's only in how they say it that makes it different. In the difference may be the way to reach more people.

My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For heaven and the future´s sakes.
by Robert Frost, from Two Tramps in Mud Time

It’s not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something. May I suggest that it be creating joy for others, sharing what we have for the betterment of personkind, bringing hope to the lost and love to the lonely.
…Leo F. Buscaglia

The place where God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
- Frederick Buechner

Great Insight

From management guru Seth Godin:

Why jazz is more interesting than bowling

Bowling is all about one number: the final score. And great bowlers come whisker-close to hitting the perfect score regularly. Not enough dimensions for me to be fascinated by, and few people pay money to attend bowling matches.

Jazz is practiced over a thousand or perhaps a million dimensions. It's non-linear and non-predictable, and most of all, it's never perfect.

And yet...

when we get to work, most of us choose to bowl.
--Seth Godin

Which, I believe, is why I love what I do. It is more like jazz than bowling. It is people needing to work together and improvise from our knowledge and experience. It is never dull, sometimes out of tune, but is always a work in progress. It was why I loved parish ministry (until it became too administrative); it is why I get up and go to work today.