“God looked over everything he had made; it was so good, so very good! It was evening, it was morning – Day Six. Heaven and earth were finished, down to the last detail. By the seventh day God had finished his work. On the seventh day he rested from all his work. God rested on the seventh day, He made it a Holy Day because on that day he rested from his work, all the creating God had done.” – Genesis 1:11, 2:1-4, The Message.

At the end of 2024 I “retired” from working for money. I am well aware of the fact that this is a privilege. During that fall my husband and I spent a lot of time talking about the idea of more and enough, about our values, and how we accomplish what we need and what was important to us, as a team. We have always used that terminology, ‘team.’ We both had experiences in sports, and are sports fans so the analogy works for us. As a team you have a shared goal and while you have a specific position, you need to be aware of how you support the other players. We looked at our life as a team with shared goals and decided that it made sense for me to move into a role that focused on domestic life and service. That is how I came to be “retired” at fifty-two.

Last weekend in the Review section of the Wall Street Journal there was an article titled, ‘The Point of Retirement? Enlightenment, or at Least Calm.*’ I read with curiosity now that I have been “retired” for a year. You can read the article yourself, here is what I took from it: work as long as you possibly can because that is who you are, retirement might be fine but it is essentially about coming to peace with and being ready for death. I disagree with almost everything in it.

I spent the better part of 2025 struggling with my ego around identity and validation; if you’re not “working” for money we don’t seem to have a way of valuing your worth, your intellect, your importance in society. Obviously capitalist societies need people to work so you can buy and sell and keep everything running, and we like to know ‘what you do’ so we can figure out how you fit into the relational piece of interaction, but I think the real problem with how we treat retirement is that we act like you cease to exist. This makes sense if we think retirement is the gateway to death. Here’s a news flash friends: birth is the gateway to death, we are all headed there. What we need to understand is not how to get ready for that, but how to be present to our life in each stage in which we find ourselves, how to continually learn, grow, encourage, and adjust. In short, how to stop clinging to one piece of our identity from one point in time and allow ourselves the fullness of the time we are allotted**.

There are things I liked about working: leading teams, encouraging my staff, addressing challenges, learning. None of those are things I had to stop doing. What I had to stop doing was identifying myself as my title, getting validation from external approval or a bi-weekly check, and thinking that the point was continual acquisition. When I retired I made space for someone younger than me to stretch into a role that was going to teach her a lot. I know she was not going to do it ‘my’ way, I had coached her and encouraged her, and it was time for it to be different. I can think of a lot of people in public life who have believed that only they could do a certain thing for perhaps a little longer than they should have, or maybe they were afraid to leave because they didn’t know who they would be, or how to be, if they were not what they were.

The author of the article is seventy-three and still a professor. I wonder if he has to work because he needs the money, or if he is working because he needs the identity. I wonder if he could still write and lecture and maybe tutor and support without the position. I’m not suggesting you have nothing to contribute after a certain age, on the contrary, I think that if we get stuck clinging to one part of what we have done we lose the opportunity to contribute in new ways, and we cut off the opportunity for others to expand as well. At seventy-eight my father runs support groups for families dealing with dementia, plays music in memory-care facilities, and is actively engaged in the arts community. He could not have done any of this if he held onto his professional identity. At fifty-two I support refugee families, work in the church business office, coordinate family connection for prisoners, and I write. I also play which is something I forgot how to do somewhere along the way – I think it is making me a nicer person.

We can’t all do this, we can’t all leave the money economy. I haven’t really because my husband is playing that position and we are a team. But some of us can, some of us can recognize when it might be time to rest from our work, to say that what we have done is good, that we have enough, to allow ourselves to view the world with refreshed eyes, and show up ready to learn for our next role. God didn’t keep creating, he stopped, he let it evolve, he turned it over, and he said ‘I’m here to support, let me know what you need.’ That’s not a bad model.

*Saturday/Sunday, January 10/11, 2026 WSJ. Mark Edmundson

**A great book to expand in this part of your life is Falling Upward by Richard Rohr