The Tender Ache of Finishing Well

October 29, 2025 was my last day of work, and the word that keeps circling my heart is bittersweet. I’m grateful, healthy, and still pretty much young at heart, ready to enjoy a new season. Yet there’s also the tender ache of goodbye. No more office. No more badge. No more “social worker” in the paid, day-to-day sense. It’s strange to set down an identity I carried for years and the validation that sometimes came with it.

Yet underneath the tender ache, there’s a steady peace. I finished well. The work mattered. And who I am—how I love, how I serve, how I strengthen hearts—doesn’t end because a paycheck does. Titles change; calling remains.

I’ll miss the families I served. Their faces and stories are stitched into my memory like patches on a well-worn quilt. Some I may never see again, but I pray the seeds planted will keep growing—quietly, faithfully, in God’s timing. If I was able to be even a small glimpse of His kindness, then it was worth every long day and late-night thoughts about “how to help next.”

Grief and Gratitude can share the same room.

What comes next? Rest, Refresh, Reset. The kind I used to promise myself I’d do “after work” but rarely did because tired eyes and full days won out.

Now I’m looking ahead to:

• More writing—the kind that requires unhurried mornings and lingering with ideas.

• Reading the books that have waited patiently on my shelves.

• Studying the Word of God with deeper focus, letting truth rebuild and refresh.

• Serving and volunteering in new capacities—without a time clock, but with the same heart.

My husband and I are always saying, “It’s a season.” Retirement, too, is a season—one I intend to enter with gratitude and curiosity. Not to recreate the past, but to receive the present. Scripture says, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1, ESV). I’m choosing to trust that the God who guided me into this work will guide me in what comes after it.

If you’re standing at your own place of transition—ending a role, closing a chapter, turning in a badge—be gentle with yourself. Grief and gratitude can share the same room. You’re allowed to feel off balance and still be grounded. You can miss what was and look forward to what will be. Let both be true.

Here’s to a new chapter—one page at a time, with open hands and a grateful heart.

Going on to the next chapter.