Category: rest and play

Step Back a Moment

Shaking it up, changing scenes, doing a new thing – it’s energizing. It can also be draining. Stepping away from normal routines is a form of disruption, after all, and disruptions often cause extra work. I tried doing some new things this summer, and it most certainly took extra work. Vacation time gave me a precious opportunity to travel.

On the one hand, it was a gift to be able to find new experiences in new places. On the other hand, I admit, it felt like a big challenge to get all my projects to places where they could do without me (or with less of me) for a while. Stepping away from things wasn’t easy, but I found that the energy it took to step away was a good investment.

Coming from a Christian tradition, I had the concept of Sabbath on my mind. Hebrew scriptures associate the Sabbath pause with disruption, and understandably so. Local economies had to bear the burden of losing an entire day’s worth of productivity. All the same, those scriptures emphasize the Sabbath pause as important, powerful, and even life-giving.

Not at all the same as getting in some vacation time, the concept of Sabbath encourages people to take on the sometimes-energizing, sometimes-draining, always-sacred act of stepping back from the work, habits, and assumptions that have shaped their days. Why? The book of Genesis describes a creator using the seventh day to pause and look at the creation that had emerged, calling it good. With that in mind, pausing and looking at what we’re doing becomes something valuable for everyday people, too. Disruptive as it is, pausing to step away from our normal routine gives us opportunities to notice good things we might not otherwise notice.

Have you noticed anything good lately?

One thing I noticed during my own summer pause was enjoyment. It started on a rainy morning outing in Times Square that turned up tickets for a stage play starring Denzel Washington. I knew the man was a skilled and gifted actor, but I hadn’t imagined what it would be like to see him perform in person. It’s amazing to experience someone brilliantly enjoying what he does and helping the people around him enjoy it, too.

Since that day, I’ve been a little more aware of enjoyment: doing things with someone I enjoy, getting out and finding people who are enjoying what they’re doing, finding new things I enjoy. There are all sorts of variations on enjoyment. The key, and the thing I don’t always make time to do, is noticing it. That’s where pausing and stepping away came in.

Stepping away from normal routine gives us time to glimpse new experiences and perspectives. It can help us downshift into reflective mode and work through problems better. It can help us notice possibilities that we hadn’t even imagined. I found that stepping away this summer, however draining it was to make that possible, refreshed deeply me in other ways.

So I wonder: what kind of pauses will your schedule hold?

– excerpted from “Step back a moment and be aware of joy that is all around you,” originally published in the Indianapolis Star (August 12, 2018)

Sabbatical As Renewal Is An Invitation To Imagination

People of faith across generations have persisted in spiritual practices they believed would sustain and bless life over the long haul. Like prayer, like community, like Sabbath and sabbatical, some practices spread through a person’s soul or a community’s life and, in one way or another, bless us profoundly for the long-haul.

In the case of pastoral ministry, regular renewal and sabbatical times are opportunities to receive sustenance for the long-haul. Renewal leaves help leaders with uniquely demanding schedules carve out time to renew their resources for that ministry. These leaves express a community’s commitment to faithfully structure itself in ways that will sustain life for all its members. While not all businesses and institutions in our culture prioritize sustaining and blessing structures, the church has prophetic opportunity to embrace exactly this sort of blessing process, for its leaders and for itself.

Another way to think about this is around pastoral passion: at some point in a pastor’s discernment regarding call to ministry, she was able to tap into a wellspring of joy around the calling – however inchoate at the time – that led (in most cases) to her taking on the challenges of eschewing a more financially lucrative career, obtaining theological training and ecclesial vetting, and forming herself as an emerging pastor. Sabbaticals are times to re-tap into that vein of connection with God and with God’s people so that joy in the calling might reenergize the work of the calling.

If a pastor were to walk into her office after a few months away feeling energized and refreshed for ministry, ready to step back with vigor into her pastoral duties, then what might she have been doing for those months prior? The answer, of course, varies radically among pastors, and that is a good thing. Renewal leaves should be designed so that an individual pastor in all her individuality can live into the joys of her particular avocationas, spiritual disciplines, relationships, and so on in ways that will be vitalizing beyond what any one-size-fits-all program can hope to achieve. The same holds true for congregational activities undertaken during the pastor’s leave period . . .

Sacred Habits & Me

Sabbath itself challenges many cultural contexts, ancient as well as contemporary. Whether it’s a Sabbath day after six days of labor or a Sabbath year after six years, the concept pushes us to expect, both for ourselves and for our neighbors, periods of time when we will not necessarily expect the production of tangible results. Practicing Sabbath provides a divinely-sanctioned opportunity to value the lives of entire communities based on grounds other than productivity and usefulness for work. However, somewhat paradoxically, precisely this “stepping away” from day-to-day productivity can be the catalyst for greater excellence in a congregation and a pastor’s ministry.

– excerpted from “The Practice of Sabbatical as Renewal,” a chapter co-authored with Robert Saler, in Sacred Habits: The Rise of the Creative Clergy (Intersections: Theology and the Church in a World Come of Age) Paperback – September 21, 2016, by Rev. Chad R Abbott (Author, Introduction), Rev. Carol Howard Merritt (Foreword). 187-203.

Sacred Habits: The Rise of the Creative Clergy is now available on Amazon.