Embellish on your current job, avocation and/or volunteer work during the past half-century of your life.
For 45 years I served as pastor of churches in Philadelphia and northeast Pennsylvania and staff positions in regional church bodies in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, New York, and New Jersey, retiring in mid-2013. Throughout these years I attempted to live out commitments to peacemaking, minority empowerment, and justice for women, racial/ethnic groups, and gay and lesbian persons.
In my retirement, which began in April, 2013, I still do some fill-in preaching for churches without a pastor or whose pastor is on vacation, etc. I have also done a couple of small consultant jobs with regional church bodies.
Much of my time in this year has been as caregiver for my wife, Jean, in her long-term struggle with metastatic breast cancer (since 1993) in her lung, a stroke on Valentine's Day this year, followed in early June with the discovery of two large, rapidly growing brain tumors (same metastatic breast cancer), craniotomy to remove as much as possible of them, with follow-up gamma-knife and whole-brain radiation to try to wipe out any remaining cancer in her brain. At the time of our 50th reunion, she was recovering from all of that and continuing in hormonal treatment related to the cancer in her lung. Shortly after the reunion she fell and broke her right hip, the therapy no longer contained her cancer, and she went into a gradual decline, home hospice care, and death on 1/20/2016.
In 2022 I moved into an independent living apartment in continuum of care retirement community (CCRC) called House of the Good Shepherd in Hackettstown, NJ, where I quickly became involved in governance activities, becoming secretary of the residents' council for about a year and most recently elected president of the residents' council. This has led to involvement in a state-wide organization of residents' councils of CCRCs in New Jersey (ORANJ).