I’m still working on how my new phase of retirement will be structured. Yes, I’ve now been retired for six years but as I approach 72 years of age, things are changing. First, in about a year I will be leaving my home for the past 30 years and moving to a retirement community in Florida called Westminster Shores in St. Petersburg. It is one more adaption of the Abram story of leaving my familiar life with all its connections and stability and setting forth on a new adventure. Like Abram, I’m trusting God that what lies ahead will hold promise. I’ve done this before in moving from church to church, but somehow this new phase seems to be different. Always before, I was moving from one set of connections to another set of connections within the familiar framework of church life.
While the retirement community will certainly have it’s framework, it is totally new territory. I’m not the pastor with the expectations around that position before me. My professional career is ended. I can become active in a church or the presbytery if I want, but it is not assumed. In that sense, I need to be more intentional about how I’m going to relate to the church that has been an integral part of my professional life throughout adulthood. Along with that, most of the connections that opened up possibilities will now be gone. I can create new ones but if I do so it will be like beginning again.
Like Abram, I am leaving the familiar behind and beginning anew. In that sense it is a new adventure. It’s a different type of adventure from past changes because my body reminds me that this is more like a final stage. I don’t have any immediate health threats but likely this is the last place that I will live with the possible exception of some health facility in the last days and even that is provided for in my new community.
So what disciplines do I need to establish to structure this new and likely final phase of my earthly life? That is what I am seeking to define.
