Following My Wife onto the Next Path of Our Pilgrimage

© March 13, 2008 by Norman Stolpe

At the Five Day Academy for Spiritual Formation in which I participated March 9-14, 2008, Liz Canham asked us to identify where we were in the cycle of orientation ► disorientation ► reorientation with which we had been examining the Psalms (per Walter Brueggemann). Among several steps I listed, major milestones were the deaths of my mother-in-law and my father along with the significant decline of my mother, the process of getting our third son Erik through college and launched into his own adulthood, and the advance planning for my “retirement” in about four years. Later the same day, Robert Benson asked us to what we were being drawn in the next season of our journeys. After extended silence in the presence of God, I wrote the following entry in my journal.

In the season that has begun to unfold within and before me, I will no longer be the son of living parents, nor the parent of a dependent child, nor the pastor of a congregation. Of the four defining roles of my active responsibility, I will only continue to be a husband.

Just writing this paragraph jolts me with the realization that the attention I have been giving to preparing for a “retirement” ministry and planning for relocation are misplaced. I have long talked about – and tried to practice – living each day so I will become the kind of old person others like to be with. I am just now seeing with acute clarity that I need to live these next transitional years so that I am the husband my wife wants to be with for another twenty years.

My daughter-in-law Rachel said something a few weeks ago about what a wonderful support and asset my wife Candy had been in our years of ministry – moving to places quite foreign to a Minnesota girl, such as New Jersey and Texas. And Rachel said, without rebuke, only awareness, that now it would be my turn to affirm, support and nourish this resplendent Grandma in her season. This is the time for me to find my fulfillment in her joy, just as she has found her joy in my calling for forty years.

My list of transitions in my reorientation illuminated the path with insight when asking “to what am I being drawn in the next season of my journey?” But I don’t think I could or should make a list of tasks, rather I am drawn to pay attention to this unfolding transition with this insight and intention.

We will still need to get Erik launched, relocate and find a “retirement” ministry, but I now see Candy’s place in that, not just as more important but as the perspective with which to guide the journey.