Thursday, May 31, 2018

Vacation

So, how was your vacation?  I am anticipating the question.  It often comes after some time away.  A simple, one-word answer, "Good!" is never quite sufficient.  So, today I've decided to say what this vacant time away means to me.

It is about self-care.  I cannot keep going incessantly, working day after day, week after week, weekend after weekend.  I am not God.  Yes, I know that theologically and intellectually, but sometimes I don't act like I know it.  It is important to disengage in order to reengage more faithfully.  It is important to lose focus in order regain focus and live with greater clarity.  It is important to step out of my routines and my role, to realize that life is more than what one does.  It is a gift to be cherished.

I am glad to have completed the course with my first confirmation class.  From World Communion Sunday to Pentecost Sunday was a long haul with many challenges, but I wanted to be present for our ten confirmation students.  I find myself praying for our confirmands, these newest disciples of Jesus Christ.  I am praying that the Holy Spirit will be evident in them throughout their lives and that the gift of faith will be sufficient to see them through their own challenges.  I pray that they will be filled with joy.  I pray that the community of faith will continue to be important to them.

My vacation was filled with joy at the birth of our grandson, Wyatt.  We have waited for his birth.  It is so good to be close enough to hold him and hope for a good life for him.  I pray that God will bless and keep him.  We are blessed.

My vacation was filled with some worry and waiting.  Early on, my parents took sick and were both in the ER in separate rooms with a similar illness.  It is one thing to visit the hospital as a pastor.  It is another to visit the hospital as a son.  Gratefully, both are home again and on the mend.

My vacation was sometimes disorienting.  I realize I like ministry more than I do the mundane tasks of sorting and settling, helping to manage a household.  I get depressed and disoriented when I do not have an appointment book that tells me what to do next.

My vacation brought deeper opportunities for prayer as I watched the local and national news broadcasts.  I have never prayed through a newscast before.  It may be an emerging spiritual discipline.  There is much that disturbs me in the news.  I am learning to "take it to our God in prayer."

Finally, I am reminded of the wise words of a clergy colleague who wrote an email to bless me on my way on the eve of my sabbatical in 2012.  Dick knew that I was reluctant to go away for three months.  My goal in that sabbatical was to get out of my role and need to control in the New Hampshire Conference of the United Church of Christ.  The pastor said that sabbatical was a matter of trusting in God--a foretaste of times to come--retirement and, yes, even death, when I would need to release my grip on life and not be defined by my work.  In a similar way, a vacation is about growing in trust and entrusting myself to God who brings order from chaos and chaos from order, who resurrects the dead, and whose love in Christ never lets go of me.

I am grateful for the time, for this vacation.

Creator God, who hallowed the seventh day of creation as sabbath time and who modeled that even on that silent seventh day when Jesus lay dead in his tomb, help me to remember my own need for sabbath time.  You are God; I am not.  That, indeed, is good news!  Thank you!  Amen.


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