Today Is Not The Day

Five years ago today I retired from Mayo Clinic. Retired! What a wonderful word! What a wonderful "goal" to reach! I retired, but I wasn't exactly retired.

I had worked at Mayo Clinic as an occupational therapist for 27 years. 27 good years in a career that was rewarding and where I worked with many great people, both patients and co-workers, along the way. But as July, 2013 came to an end it was time to move on. In 2011 I had finished a Masters of Divinity degree and for two years I had been seeking a church to serve as a pastor. In early July things fell into place, as I received and accepted a call to serve in Dulce, New Mexico as the pastor of the Jicarilla Apache Reformed Church. And so I retired.

In leaving one vocation for another my retirement was more a matter of semantics than fact. I was of an age and had accumulated sufficient years of employment at Mayo that I could "retire" rather than resign. The two benefits were being able to keep Mayo for my health insurance, and having Mayo host a party on my last day. I was still the primary breadwinner for my family, and we needed to eat. So late in August Robin, Kat and I moved to New Mexico to begin the next chapter of life.

One of the things that has become a habit of mine here is to have an eye set towards the ground as I walk around the church property. I am frequently finding nails and broken glass on the ground, even five years later. The picture on top is from when I set a lawn chair out yesterday to do a bit of reading. As I sat down I saw a nail right in front of the chair.  Robin has heard me say, more than once, that the day I don’t find nails or glass in the yard is the day it is time to leave the ministry in Dulce.  I found a nail yesterday, and for me that is close enough to know that today is not the day to start packing.

More seriously, there are a number of reasons that after five years in, it is not time to go. Not time as far as we can figure it out, that is. We trust in God and that whatever our ideas may be, in the end he will make it clear when that day comes.

When we came to Dulce it was with the understanding that we would be here about ten years. Five years in, we could be marking the half-way point. Could be, but we think we are still on the uphill slope, so to speak.

Five years ago the denomination we are a part of had a plan to provide financial support to the pastor's salary for ten years, hence the ten year timeline. That plan has proved unsustainable, and so we are working out other ways to fill the gap and cover my salary, and so that factor by itself is not enough for us to sense the end approaching.

But five years has also made clear some things that we didn’t understand when we arrived. We thought that we were coming to serve a small church in a small town, with the cross-cultural aspect of living on a reservation and among the Jicarilla Apache people. And while those things are all true we have come to see more clearly the "mission" aspect of this ministry, in that even though the church has been here 104 years this is still very much an unevangelized place. Many people may know the name of Jesus, but they are unaware of who he really is and why he lived and died the way he did.

For the past five years we have been doing the basic work that any small church might do in proclaiming the good news of Jesus, but perhaps of nearly equal importance we have been building relationships and growing in our understanding of the particular problems within this community.  To bring the hope of the gospel to people outside of the church proper they need to know that we care for them and for the things that they struggle with in life.

And so, five years in and at age where increasing numbers of my friends are moving to "greener pastures", I don’t feel all that old.  And, thankfully, neither does Robin. Our family has changed a bit in the last year, and we hope to be able to write about that a bit more freely soon. In a counter-cultural fashion during our last ten years together we have gone from an empty nest to a very full one.

"Real" retirement? If could be five years out but we are thinking that ten years are perhaps more likely.  Stray nails and glass or not, today is not the day. To God be the glory! Amen.

If you, or your church, would like to support the work of the ministry in Dulce, either through a single gift or ongoing support, please give me a call or send an email to: bradkautz@gmail.com