The Retirement I’m Actually Afraid Of

Every Sunday morning, I look at myself in the big mirror we have in our living room before I go to church. I don’t know when I started doing it, but it’s become one of the most honest moments of my week.

I’m not checking how I look. I’m checking whether I’m there. Whether I’m present enough to hold other people’s fears, hopes, questions, and prayers.

This Sunday, I caught myself thinking something I hadn’t thought before: when I retire, I won’t need this mirror anymore. Not because I won’t still be a person—but because I won’t be stepping into a room that tells me who I am.

And for the first time, I felt a flicker of fear that had nothing to do with money or time or plans. It had to do with identity. With reflection. With what happens to a self when there is no longer a space that mirrors it back.

I’ve spent most of my life as a kind of chameleon. Not in a dishonest way. In a pastoral way. I read rooms. I sense emotional weather. I adjust my language, my tone, my theology, my posture, trying to become what the moment needs.

It’s a gift, I think.

Or at least it’s been useful. But it also means my identity has always been formed in relationship to a space. A community. A role. A shared story. I’ve known who I am because of where I stand.

But in less than 5 months that is all going to change! I am going to retire!

And suddenly it hits me: suddenly feels a little like being a chameleon released into a forest with no walls left to color-match.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about a story I love, The Golden Compass, where the main character carries a device called the alethiometer—a kind of truth-telling instrument. It looks like a compass, but it doesn’t give direct answers. It reflects reality back in symbols. It has to be interpreted. It requires attention, patience, presence. The alethiometer doesn’t tell Lyra who she is. It helps her discover herself in relationship to the world she’s moving through.

I wonder if my Sunday mirror has been a kind of alethiometer. Not a tool for vanity, but for orientation. A way of locating myself in the story I’m stepping into. A way of asking, quietly and honestly: Who am I in this room? Who is God here? What truth is trying to be read?

And what I’m afraid of is not losing my job. It’s losing my instrument. Losing the reflective space that has helped me interpret myself for so many years.

There’s a particular kind of grief that comes with good endings. Not the grief of failure or burnout or scandal—but the grief of a calling faithfully lived, gently dissolving. There’s nothing to blame. No one to be angry with. Just gratitude mixed with disorientation. Love with nowhere specific to go.

It’s not exactly loneliness. It feels more like a subtle spiritual orphanhood. Not rejected. Just… unassigned.

So maybe retirement isn’t about finding a new role. Maybe it’s about learning to live without the instruments that have helped me interpret myself for so long. And maybe, beneath all of that, there is a deeper presence—an instrument I’ve never really had to trust because I always had others to lean on.

I wish I could say I’m ready for that. I’m not. I’m still scared. I still want the mirror. I still want the room. I still want to know who I am by where I stand.

Maybe there is a deeper presence underneath all my mirrors and roles. A God who has always been there, quietly holding the whole thing together. That’s the story I’ve told other people for years.

Now I’m the one who has to decide whether I trust it.

And the truth is, I don’t know yet. Some days I do. Some days I don’t. Some days I still feel like a chameleon with no walls and no colors to match.

So maybe retirement isn’t a leap of faith. Maybe it’s a long, slow stumble into a different way of being human—one where I’m not so sure who I am, but I’m learning to ask a different question.

Not: What am I for?

But: Am I still loved when I’m not as useful.

Your friens and pastor, thankful for the mirror you’ve always been, Brook