My first order of business upon retiring was to set up a place in which to do business... whatever that business would turn out to be. Though its contours were blurry (but I’d figure it out), I knew “that business” would include writing. 

My mentor and friend Don Schutt is wont to ask, “What makes your heart sing?” For the forty years of my ministry, not a day went by that I did not write something-- a newsletter column, a sermon, a blog post, a letter, an email, a Bible study, or my morning journal entry. The time I spent writing, though work, wasn’t work at all. It was a pleasure.

I told my friend Gary, also a retired pastor who continues to write, “I can’t not write.” After fifty years of running, I’m addicted to ‘the runner’s high’ that follows miles of physical exertion, pickin’ ‘em up and puttin’ ‘em down. I’m convinced there’s also some sort of endorphin-charged release that is the fruit of picking out words and putting them down for as long as it takes to make meaning or sense of something, tell a story, or record something I heard or saw that delighted me. 

A verse in the lovely hymn, “When In Our Music God is Glorified,” bears witness to the capacity of making music to make the heart sing:

How often, making music, we have found
a new dimension in the world of sound,
as worship moved us to a more profound
Hallelujah! 

Likewise, how often while composing something do we writers find pleasure deep down in the world of words. If only for the personal gratification that accompanies putting slivers of my life into words for safekeeping and future savoring-- the composition of a verbal scrapbook-- I’m going to continue to write.

But where?  For forty years, I did the majority of my writing in my study at a church. Once I retired, I needed to seek a new place for my ponderings. 

Truth be told, I looked forward to such a place for a long time. 38 years ago, I had a room I called “my study” in the first-floor flat in St. Louis that served as Jennie’s and my first apartment at our first full-time church. But when our first child was born seven months or so into that call, “my study” became “his nursery.” His two sisters followed, thereby occupying any additional rooms Jennie and I acquired in the homes we lived in during their growing-up years.  No room for “my study” during those years.    

When at long last we were empty nesters, the freed-up rooms became guest bedrooms, not conducive for a study, and during the last eight years of my ministry, though our home had an extra room on the second floor that I claimed as my future study from the get-go, Jennie did such a good job of transforming the church’s Senior Minister’s office into hospitable space that I put my writing roots down there and left the room upstairs at home unaddressed.  It bided its time until now.

So it is that the one-time father of a newborn son who gave up “my study” for the raising of a family is now a retired grandfather who has a fourth bedroom-- space Jennie says was probably a nursery-- to turn into a writing den.

The late Frederick Buechner is one of my “paper mentors,” someone whose writing has blessed my ministry and tutored my way of living. His iconic words, “Listen to your life.  See it for the fathomless mystery that it is” have fanned the flames of my own desire to mine the unfolding of my own life to write perceptively, honestly, and well. As I reread his memoirs during Covid, a lifeline to beauty, sanity, and holiness in the midst of that ugly travail, I was reminded of his beloved study/library/sitting room at his homestead in rural Vermont, a room he dubbed “The Magic Kingdom.” As I read the verbal tour he gives the reader of that space made sacred to him by photos, books, trinkets, and mementos, I experienced the anticipatory delight of becoming the architect/designer of my own consecrated space. 

So it was that in the first weeks of my retirement, Jennie came to my side. She did what she does best – what makes her heart sing – which is to bring order out of chaos a la God churning creation cream out of the disorderly Deep (Genesis 1:2). She turned “the room upstairs” into “my study.” My desk is next to a window that looks out on a magnificent maple tree. People pull over in the fall and take pictures of its blazing canopy of orange leaves. I write in its shade. Hence, I’ve dubbed my writer’s den The Maple Loft. Gifted to me by my wife’s gifts for order, décor, and beauty, I’ll spend the next chapter of my life savoring the gifts accrued over forty years of ministry listening to others’ lives, glimpsing in them the fathomless mystery they are, and writing about it. 

In the anticipation of the pondering, praying, and writing that will unfold here in The Maple Loft, the endorphins are doing their work deep down within where quiet joy... and words... are born.