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Three months later . . .

  While enjoying birthday dinner with a friend I noted that I’m not sure if I’m still exhausted from my 18 years in the ministry or depressed.   Or, I suppose, it could be both.   I’m kind of feeling a bit guilty that I’ve been retired for a little over 3 months and I’m not doing much of anything, not even the things that I was really looking forward to doing. She pointed out that it took me 18 years or more to get wound up so tight I couldn’t keep going, so it’s likely to take more than three months to unwind. Duh.  THIS makes sense to me.  One of the first things I learned from one of my earliest 12 Step sponsors was that getting clean didn’t mean that I was going to heal from all the stuff that happened in my life overnight.  “If it took a year to walk into the woods, it will take a year to walk back out again.”    I wrote every day of my ministry and every day for the 8 years of college and seminary before that.  I don’t want to write very much just now. I was surrounded by
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In the beginning…

 I’m sure there are plenty of blogs with a first post titled something like “In the beginning…” I don’t expect that mine will necessarily stand out in the sea of blogs available to us all.  It’s just that I want to write.  I want to write about my experiences in parish ministry and COVID and retiring and how I got to this place. I have known I want to write about this for quite some time. In July I spoke with my friend Sandhya Jha about the possibility of writing a book from the perspective of being a pastor during the COVID lockdown and its aftermath.  She was quite encouraging.  Then came the months of preparing to retire, getting the congregation as ready as possible for my leaving, finding a place to live, moving out of the Parsonage and into the apartment, and so much more.  So very busy!  So very little writing getting done outside of sermons and such.  I know that if I want to write seriously I needed to write daily, so I got an app that supplies a daily writing prompt. THAT was
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