I had never thought of retiring from my faculty position at a physical education college. For years I had worked to help the college survive and develop a research profile, a way to showcase academic research online. This was helped when a colleague created a small research institute. Then a university merger was announced and faculty members were offered an early retirement package.
I was shaken when my research colleague said that the merger would offer him no promotion prospects and he had to accept the package for financial reasons. I didn’t want to lose all the research we’d built and battle on alone. Hope for new opportunities was vanishing in a flash.
As I prayed for a few weeks, it became clear that I was not personally responsible for the progress of my colleague or an institution. For guidance, I turned wholeheartedly to Mary Baker Eddy’s spiritual interpretation of the twenty-third Psalm.
I was shaken when my research colleague said that the merger would offer him no promotion prospects.
It begins: “[Divine love] is my shepherd; I shall not want.
“[Love] maketh me to lie down in green pastures: [love] leadeth me beside the still waters” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 578).
The word maketh told me something important. My work demands had been excessive. I had been overloaded for years (even as my mother passed on earlier that year). So it was right for divine Love to make me lie down metaphorically for a spiritual rest.
The psalm interpretation continues, “[Love] restoreth my soul [spiritual sense].” To take the early retirement offer seemed like I would be going into the dark, never to work again, but this psalm revelation felt like a bright light at the end of the tunnel. I accepted the package, knowing that my greatest need was for clearer spiritual sense. I trusted God completely to restore that.
The retirement package took effect at Christmas, but retiring faculty were required to complete the academic year as if they were visiting staff, on lower pay. During this period I studied an essay on place by an unknown author. It begins: “The place you seek is seeking you, the place you need needs you. Divine Principle, Love, brings need and supply together for mutual good.”
The essay addressed the injustice, limitation, and impatience I was dealing with. It helped me understand how God, not man, guides where we go or stay.
I hadn’t thought that a place could be seeking me, but then I remembered a similar college linked to a university in another part of the country. At a conference, I explained my situation to a friend who worked at this college and knew the nature of my work with my colleague. Subsequently, that institution interviewed my colleague and me for two part-time positions they had created because they were interested in our research areas. In the new academic year, we began part-time university research work without the heavy teaching and administrative loads that we had been carrying.
After a few weeks, my colleague, who preferred to be the leader of projects, said he couldn’t work with me; he was attracted to work in Australia. At that time I learned of another potential job for myself in the United States, but I didn’t pursue it. The continuing spiritual guidance that had been coming to me had assured me that divine Love was in complete control right where we were—in the UK.
That’s when my colleague had a change of heart and not only decided to work with me again, but asked me to design a project that we could do together to integrate our research fields. My understanding of Christian Science gave me inspiration to predict novel results. The project worked well and confirmed the predictions. We obtained a government grant to fund our research and disseminated the findings worldwide in articles and at conferences until I was beyond a decade after the statutory retirement age.
I thought I was entering a metaphorical wilderness, but I found abundance at every step.
Years after my colleague passed on, I edited a new book that extended our combined research so that others could build on the ideas. A professor from another university contacted me and applied our research to explore other contexts. My final article with this professor was published in an Asian research journal recently—thirty years after I took the early retirement package.
At the beginning of this experience, I thought I was entering a metaphorical wilderness, but I found abundance at every step. I saw how “Spirit, God, gathers unformed thoughts into their proper channels, and unfolds these thoughts, even as He opens the petals of a holy purpose in order that the purpose may appear” (Science and Health, p. 506).
