The R-Word

Whatever it is I’m doing right now, it’s hard to find a word for it.

Many have called it ‘Retirement’ but despite the elements of having finished something that has been a long time vocation, that word doesn’t quite fit me right now.  It conjures up pictures of ending all work-related endeavours and taking up hobbies or volunteer positions to pass the time or make important contributions in ways not possible when employed.   All good, and perhaps that time will come.  But ‘retired’ isn’t how I see myself for this next phase of my life. 

‘Resting’ is accurate for the moment.  Away on an island at our summer home with limited internet, no schedules (including meetings!), and little to no social engagements for a while, a much needed time of rest and recharging is certainly underway.   The press of this past season with a final push at the very end has spent me in every capacity, as I expected it would and intentionally offered.  Now these still waters, visits from the beaver, mornings and evenings where no human-made sound interrupts nature’s worship – my desperate soul lays down in it to sleep deeply.  But ‘resting’ isn’t the overall plan for this next phase of my life.

‘Relinquishing’.   Now there’s a true thing that’s in play.  This moving from one thing to the next has required from me one of, if not the most delicate and defining relinquishments of my life.  And while things officially passed from one to another at the end of May, the deeper letting go in the deepest places of me began many months before, and, as I am experiencing now, seems likely will continue for some time to come.  The kind of releasing, the letting go of this kind of treasure doesn’t happen in one fell swoop, as marking a moment as it may be.  There is a cellular level to this kind of offering.  Cherished loves are not glibly dismissed from the heart.

So, yes, ‘relinquishing’ is definitely in play.  But it describes what was, not what’s coming in this next phase of my life.

So what word is there for this?

A phone message left by a friend, who himself has done this not-retirement thing already, includes an off-handed semantic that captures something for me.  He won’t wish me a happy retirement, he says.  Instead, he wishes me a happy,....what?  ‘Reinventment’, he says.  Yes!  That's what this is!

There’s something being re-defined, re-focused, re-invented right now!  There’s a sense that all that’s come before, everything, even all the wretched things in my story I wish I could erase, plus any skill set, any learnings, any experience or (possibly?) wisdom I may have gathered along the way – all of it is coming together now in a new way that is powerful and strong and beautiful and important.  There’s a re-inventing of my life and ministry toward a new focus, fanned by new passions and energy and ideas that would not have been possible in an earlier rendition of me.  There’s a clear understanding that this time of my life, right now, almost 61 years old, is ripe for the new thing in a ‘reinventment’ of all God has been fashioning for me from the beginning.

‘Retirement’ is a fine word.  And its use in the plethora of cards and emails and letters that have been so lovingly presented to me in these past weeks is well understood and fondly received.  But a real retirement is yet to come.

Right now I am in a phase of ‘reinventment’.   

Because really, I’m just getting started.