NEWS & VIEWS
Changes
Liz O'Connor |  Fall 2009

I hate change when it's thrust upon me. I’m much too fond of comfortable ruts, and I’ll even stay in an uncomfortable rut for quite a while rather than change. When change is truly necessary, I have to keep reminding myself, “Change is good, change is good, no growth without change...” I’m a pessimist by nature, and I tend to expect the worst.

Right now I’m caught up in one set of changes that I’ve chosen and am feeling optimistic about, and a party to other changes I’m not so sure about.

On the positive side, I decided last spring to take early retirement, tapping into my pension from my preious job; my sister and I are selling the home we share and moving to another state; and—because I’m too young to actually retire, and because I’ll have to find a way to pay for health insurance—I’ll be looking for ways to re-invent myself. These are crazy things to do in this economy, but I have a real sense of peace about them.

The reason behind all this can be summed up in a single word, family. My son, his wife and their two children have moved just over 100 miles away from where I live now, and my sister and I (she helped raise my son and gets full grandparent status) want to be part of the children’s everyday lives, not seeing them only on flying weekend visits. The move will also bring us nearer to our other siblings who have moved in retirement, so our always emotionally close family will be geographically closer again.

My feelings about my career are a little more complex. I graduated from college the single mother of an infant, and so my first priority was to get a job that would sup- port us. While my friends talked of graduate school and internships, I was networking like mad to try to find a job that would keep bread on the table and also allow me at least some time each day with my baby. Now that my “baby” and his family are well established on their own (there really is life after tuition!) and I have that pension as a security blanket, I feel free to consider other options, to look around and see what and who I really want to be when I grow up.

Maybe the novel that almost every journalist fantasizes about writing someday will become a reality, maybe I can mentor aspiring writers, maybe I can do something for young adults who’ve had trouble learn- ing to write clearly and well. I know I’ll always write— writers can’t not write—but it may be that I’ll find some niche totally unrelated to writing and scratch my writer’s itch with journals and correspondence.

When I came here a little more than three years ago, the dynamic Karen Sue Smith gave me a whirlwind ori- entation to the tasks of magazine editors and left copious notes and an experienced production editor to help me. I looked forward to trying to do as generous a handover as Karen did for me. I’ve worked hard to maintain the quality our readers expect of CHURCH.

However, this will be the last issue of CHURCH pub- lished by the National Pastoral Life Center. Subscribers will be hearing more about that from the NPLC.

Much as I’m looking forward to a new chapter in my life, leaving the National Pastoral Life Center is going to be a real wrench. I was welcomed most generously by the staff who were here when I arrived, es- pecially the production editor Mary Good, without whom I would have been completely at sea through my first few issues. For all of us, working at the NPLC has been more than a job. It has been a source of great joy to interact with the people here, with the authors and artists who contributed to CHURCH, and with the NPLC’s board of directors. It has been a privilege to join with them in prayerful focus on our mission of promoting excellence in pastoral ministry.

The pain associated with the closing of CHURCH has been eased for me both by my decision to leave, made before I knew such a change was even being considered, and by the fact that the above-mentioned production editor retired after the summer issue.

We were fortunate to find a talented freelance de signer, Christine Cirker, to work on this issue with me, and artist Karen Kocich has made her usual fine contributions to the front section of this magazine. I can’t let the opportunity pass without mentioning the extraor- dinary job she did in our spring issue this year, which celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the National Pastoral Life Center.

I believe that God led me to this job at a time when I needed it badly, and I am confident that God will continue to bless whatever’s coming next in my life. I’m convinced that children and adults all benefit from regular contact with extended family and feel grateful to have this chance to move closer to mine. I just have to keep repeating, “Change is good, change is good...”

is the editor of CHURCH magazine.