Early Post-Retirement Thoughts

A friend encouraged me to enlarge on some comments I made to the congregation at our retirement celebration.

Some have asked — as they saw the books in my office grow fewer and fewer — if it was a hard process for me to clean out my office. While I had a few sad moments, I found it all surprisingly enjoyable. Almost immediately after announcing my retirement plans last November, I began to cull out books that I intended to give away, throw away, or sell. That only took a few days, because even though you accumulate lots of books, you only need a few. (A lesson I had learned years ago, during a building program in which I had to store nearly all my books for almost a year. I thought it would be unbearable, but I made it through the year with just one bookcase and, as a result, ended up giving away about half of my collection. From that point on, I deliberately limited the book space in my office, giving away, selling, or throwing away an old book before adding a new one.)

Next, I turned to cleaning out my file cabinet. Because I had been collecting materials since my high school days, I assumed this would be a weeks-long process, but it took perhaps an afternoon and a half as I tossed file after file into the recycling bin (finally they would be put to good use!) and came across the occasional serendipitous find (like my candidating sermon from 1978 that I re-preached in my final service at the church).

There was for me something cleansing about getting rid of all these old files that I no longer needed (and probably, for the most part, never did) and those old books that had outlived their usefulness. And then it dawned on me why this whole process had not been that difficult: ministry is not about books and files and plaques on the wall, it's about people. I used books, but I don't love my books. Like tools, I used some of those files, but I never cherished them. Rather, as I told our folks that Sunday afternoon, "It's you I love, and it's you I will miss."