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.
