Retirement

There are less than nine months to go before I retire from full-time ministry. I think the congregation is starting to realize that fact and take it to heart, because there has been a little flurry of activity recently. In trying to come up with data for the self-study, the congregation has realized that they haven't done anything with their membership list for a number of years. They've realized that there are people on the list that really should not be there, and they want to take care of it before the new pastor arrives, whenever that may be. (Of course, they have not yet dealt with the problem of why they didn't want to have anything to do with cleaning up that list for the last 10 years.)

It's good to see even that little bit of activity in the congregation, even though it's coming about because we are leaving. I'm spending part of the time over the next few months making up some lists of what the congregation needs to be responsible for. I'm surprised how long that list is getting, because I thought I was doing a good job of trying to encourage the people here to be more involved. Instead, now that the last few months are upon us, I find that I took way too much upon myself (partly because it seemed that no one else was willing to do anything) and, as I told the district president, I found that I've become more of a workaholic than I ever thought I would be.

That's part of the reason why I'm looking forward to retirement. The district president recently told me and a few other circuit counselors that after a year of being district president, he said finding out that the stress is much less in his life, even though he gets saddled with all of the bad situations in the district. I thought it was an interesting comment, to be able to say that the parish pastorate is so much more stressful than being a district president. I would've thought it would've been the other way around.