Our church in Bellingham has had a practice for several years of handing out “star words” as part of the celebration of Epiphany. The invitation is for individuals to take a paper star from a basket. On the star is a word. Each person is then invited to think upon that word and reflect on what invitation or challenge it presents for the year to come. Sometimes the word is interesting and pleasant. Other times it may not seem to fit that particular individual. Regardless of the sense of match or mismatch, people are invited to spend a year thinking about their star word. At Epiphany worship the following year, a few individuals volunteer to offer brief reflections on the words they received. We are new to the church, so we haven’t had much time to observe the tradition. Last year, when the congregation was meeting remotely, we received our star words in the mail. I remember being interested in the testimonies of church members who shared about the previous year’s experience, but those reflections were from people that I didn’t yet know and they didn’t have much lasting impact on me.

The star word for 2021 that fell from my envelope was “Plan.” It amused me because in the six months of my retirement that had passed to date, very little had gone according to plan. Events around our retirement were muted by the pandemic and the process of sorting our possessions and moving had taken longer and been more complex than we had envisioned. It was harder to find a rental home than we had anticipated and our son and his family had moved from one home to another during the year, changing the location where we would be shopping for a new home. We were anticipating our daughter and son in law’s moving back to the United States after 5 years in Japan, but their exact plans were shifting due to the pandemic. The finances of retirement were different than we had anticipated. We were uncertain about the process of applying for and receiving Social Security benefits. Expenses were higher than we anticipated. It seemed like “Plan” was something like the opposite of what was happening in my life.

I decided that perhaps the word was an invitation for me to do more thinking about planning and to make better plans for the year to come, but I couldn’t figure out how to apply that word to the year that was unfolding. We wanted to move forward with solving our housing, but we couldn’t quite figure out exactly where to look for a house and didn’t know how to go about making a plan. It seemed like the process of home seeking had shifted dramatically from when we had last made a home purchase. We searched the Internet and looked at a lot of pictures of houses online, but we didn’t even know where our price point would be. It was hard to get a grasp on what we were looking for.

As the year progressed, it seemed much more like chance was a more operative word than plan. We were looking forward to a year in which we might be able to celebrate birthdays in person with each of our grandchildren, but we hadn’t processed that making the party for our two year old grandson would involve a 6,000 mile trip across the continent and back. We had wanted to travel as part of our retirement, and we enjoy pulling our camper and staying in campgrounds when we travel, but the logistics of planning such a trip were daunting. Even after we decided to make the trip, we were slow to have an actual plan. We kept telling friends that we were coming to visit, but that our exact plans weren’t yet formed.

I couldn’t quite come up with a plan for how we were going to proceed.

The lease for our rental home would expire at the end of September, so we needed a plan about how we would proceed with housing, but nothing was becoming clear. On at least a couple of occasions I told our landlord that I was uncertain about whether or not we would be renewing our lease. I just didn’t have a plan.

As it turned out, things finally fell into place. We had our big trip, shortened a bit from our original vision and with fewer days for unstructured exploration, but we had a wonderful time visiting with our daughter’s family and celebrating our grandson’s birthday. We were in South Carolina long enough to participate in a wonderful project of building an outdoor play structure for our grandson. We had a delightful visit with our church friends in South Dakota on our return.

The big surprise of the year, not planned at all, was that we fell into a new job. Our church needed an interim minister of faith formation and when we inquired about the possibility of serving in that position, we got swept up in the search process and soon were being interviewed. Before we left on our trip, we had been hired for the position and were set to start as soon as we got back. The job turned out to be an excellent match for our energies and interests and we have been blessed by the opportunity. It wasn’t what we planned for our retirement, but it is just what we needed to be doing.

A person we met at our church became our realtor and opened up a process of home searching. Things didn’t proceed quite as quickly with us in a new job and having limited time due to a 40 mile commute, but we began to get a vision of the process. Our landlord agreed to a one month extension of our rental and that month was enough for us to finalize the purchase of a home and get moved. Being just down the road from our son and his family seems to be just the right place for us now.

2021 turned out to be a good year for us despite the fact that plan didn’t seem to be the word of the year. Perhaps my star word was inviting me to lay aside plans and trust that things would work out.

Then, yesterday, I drew a new star word from the basket for the year to come. My 2022 star word is “Longevity.” I’m hoping that this one isn’t an opposite word like last year’s. I’m not yet attached to the star word practice, but I’m willing to pay attention and see what unfolds.