i turned 50.

It's been kind of a big year.

I started thinking about writing this post when it was still 2025, but it was such a big year the pages of the calendar fluttered away and now it's 2026.

This week marks six months since my 50th birthday, so I guess I've had some time to think about it. Sort of?

Let's backtrack a bit.

In December 2023 I put in a proposal for a yearlong sabbatical for 2025. That proposal got approved in spring 2024, shortly before our campus announced a major transition of the web content management system (my area). I spent the rest of 2024 at a dead sprint, sorting out all the things I knew I'd need to have sorted out ahead of my sabbatical and also this new sudden onset project which worked out, essentially, to be a rebuild of the website. Whee!

By the time Christmas 2024 rolled around, I was so bone-tired it was hard to be excited about my yearlong sabbatical. Last spring, Robert got a new job and so we packed up everything, put our house on the market, and moved. We've been in temporary housing since August and we close on a house here in a couple weeks, so I'm preparing for another move.

OK, them's the facts.

Fifty years. A half-century. In the book of Leviticus chapter 25, the fiftieth year is noted as a "jubilee year" – being the year that comes after seven cycles of seven years (total, 49) in which the seventh years were meant to be sabbath years. You can read all kinds of things about this but the idea is: everything belongs to God, God is our supply, and we rest and allow Him to provide. As far as I am aware, the Israelites never fully observed these cycles either for 'regular' sabbath years or the Jubilee year. Interestingly, the Roman Catholic Church still observes jubilee years every 25 years, and one occurred over this period (December 24, 2024 to January 6, 2026) with the theme "Pilgrims of Hope."

I do feel like a pilgrim. (No fancy hat, sorry.) I haven't been feeling very hopeful though, and that's what I've been thinking about. Fortunately, godly hope isn't a feeling, it's a set orientation of the heart and soul. But it is nice when you have that nice bubbly hope feeling.

I'm grateful, certainly. Grateful for the year sabbatical; so grateful that when Robert's offer came along that his superiors took care that my situation was thoughtfully handled; grateful that we had somewhere to land, and that he loves his new job; grateful for what was truly a great run in my career with lots of fun and accomplishment and growth.

Being honest, I'm also grateful I didn't have to return. I had been feeling, over time, a sense of unease. A little pinch here and there. A sensation that something that used to fit maybe didn't anymore. Vague, formless wonderings about whether there was something else I should be doing with my minutes and hours and days ... but there are a lot of benefits associated with a faculty position, and I'd spent two decades slogging it out to finally get to the point where I could enjoy them. Only: I didn't really enjoy them like I had always expected I would.

Fifty years. A half-century. Fifty seems like one of those inflection points that most people, at minimum, make "old age" jokes about. Without being able to explain it, even as I was writing up my sabbatical proposal, I had a sense that somehow I was drawing near to an inflection point and that whatever happened, things would shift materially. They did.

It's been nothing but off-ramps since December 2024. I packed up my work office before sabbatical because it was needed for new hires. I left the day-to-day work interactions and routines as part of the sabbatical. I packed up my house and put two thirds of it in storage. I drove a thousand miles to a new (hot! so hot!) place. I left my position and I haven't sought another. I guess you could say I walked away from my career, except that it feels more like boarding a ship and realizing after some time that the current has drifted me away, so far away that I must have been drifting a long time, and that I'm now so distant that there's no going back to the way things were.

My world has gotten rather small, and I like it. I've always loved being at home. My soundtrack is the steady, comforting tick of the clock; the birds outside; the sound of the city bus in its hourly passing. I've still been writing and those projects are very nearly brought to a satisfying finish. Sure, there are colleagues I miss seeing; I always loved the reference desk, although over time the character of the interactions changed slowly but surely and it became rare to have that high note of joy, like the bloodhound baying on the scent, from a successful intellectual chase. Moving away from beloved family and friends isn't new, but it isn't easier, either.

What do I do now? I may be wrong, because I feel even more removed from the ways and means of "what's normal" but I suspect that looking after my home, looking after my husband, feeling and thinking and reading and walking and praying and seeking something ... real but mostly unseen, will be even stranger as an answer to "what do you do" to most folks than it ever has been in my lifetime. We have no children, my former career may be behind me, and at this point at least I have absolutely zero desire to become a lady of causes – volunteering, boards, meetings, committees, and so on (no thank you!).

I do think there was a part of this time that was a healing from busyness and burnout and heart-sickness from the wounds inflicted on a sensitive soul by what the world has fashioned as "the modern workplace." Probably I still am healing, somewhat, but I can feel a change. Instead of turning my face away from the dark, I begin to feel that I am turning my face toward the light.

A few weeks ago, as I was occupied with homely things like laundry and the constant and inevitable wiping of kitchen counters, I heard the Lord ask me: Do you believe your best days are ahead of you?

At first I just didn't really answer. He kept asking, not continuously, but every so often.

Do you believe your best days are ahead of you?

No.

I finally said, no, I really don't. And I felt sadder and also better to finally have said it.

He said, Well I guess you need to work on that then.

So until I get further instructions, that's what I'll be doing. Working on believing that my best days are ahead. A prisoner of hope, you might say, per Zechariah 9:12.

Turn you to the strong hold, ye prisoners of hope: even to day do I declare that I will render double unto thee;

I can hear some of you saying, but fifty's not old. Shoot, you're just getting started. Point conceded. Julia Child published Mastering the Art of French Cooking at 49. The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook was published when Ina Garten was 51. Martha Stewart launched her magazine and TV show about this same time in life too. But I don't need or want to be a success story suitable for an internet listicle. A good life, a faithful life, well-lived – that seems like plenty to aspire to, and also doesn't require high definition cameras (again, no thank you).

I guess it's time to start writing in volume two. Thanks for reading.