A glorious week off to do nothing.
My husband and I decided on it when our initial vacation plans fell through—first an international trip that had to be postponed, and then a domestic one. Initially we contemplated no vacation at all, but we both needed to get away, and so we settled on a “staycation” to tide us over till spring.
On the surface, we didn’t do much. I crafted. We both wrote. We ate at a lot of local spots we loved and gave ourselves permission to be more indulgent in our purchases than usual. I cooked some of our favorites and he cooked too. We tackled household projects on the “meaning to get to” list.
One day, after having been out and about having fun, we came back home and took a nap.
Lovely little small things, all. Nothing so out of the ordinary from our daily life—only more and bigger and away from work. But at one point, during the festivities, I looked at my husband and enthused, “I remember who I am again!”
It occurred to me, when I said that, what it meant: we have been practicing Sabbath.
I love my job. I really do. I’m one of the fortunate blessed who actually ended up in the field I wanted to work in for my entire life: academia and higher ed. My work, in addition to giving me surprising opportunities to stretch myself and uncover new talents, gives me the chance to actually use the skills I’ve spent my life honing and learning. A rare find.
But also, it’s a job. And, having ramped up considerably over the past several years, has taken over my whole entire actual life. I am working later on more days. I sometimes work into the evening. I answer texts in my off-hours from students and colleagues. Some of this is natural: higher ed does not allow for a traditional 9-5. Some of it is also opportunity: I have a rare window to make career hay, and, aware this is a gift from God, am trying to make the most of it.
But I am not great at knowing my limits. I am tired a lot. I get irritable and frustrated more often than I’d like. Molehills at work sometimes feel like mountains. I catastrophize. Some days I feel like the embodiment of a human doing, rather than a human being: lurching from laundry to project to student to making dinner to work initiative to grading, keeping all the balls in the air, making sure no one anywhere is disappointed or left hanging.
Home reminds me I am a human being.
When I’m home, I craft and create and write and read, and I refuel myself with all the good and true and beautiful things God has placed into my life. I rest more; I worry less; I laugh a lot. I try new things. I enjoy old things. I take the time to enjoy my blessings. I realize that my work is just fine without me there, and no one is dying and nothing is on fire.
I reorient myself to the world, and to my priorities, properly.
Church does this too. I have sometimes wondered why it matters so much to me to attend, especially on the sort of Sunday when I am not 100% and the sermon is a repeat (or a threepeat) or I have to deal with difficult people or a traffic snarl only permitted us to attend 50% of the service. When grieving my mother’s death, I often found myself in a pew at the end of the service without a clear sense of what had even happened: in my fog and haze, I’d muddled along and somehow missed everything.
But there is something about setting aside time for God in a dedicated way in spite of it all, in spite of the obstacles, of hearing Scripture and seeing people who also love God, of engaging in worship whether or not my mood fits the moment. Doing this reorients me to myself and to the world. It reminds me of who I am and what I am supposed to be doing and what and where my values are.
I often wondered why, after my mother’s death, I was so drawn to organizing and arranging my life. I spent a lot of time meticulously figuring out where I wanted furniture to go, or where my pens ought to live, or what I wanted my closet to look like. This culminated in what eventually became a two-year transformation of my home office.
And can I rave about this office? It is the most me room in our house: woodland and autumnal, cozy, warm. It is full of objects or books that inspire and enliven me. I love to go into it and work. Even and especially on stressful days, I abandon my computer, sit in the little chair I keep by the window, pull a blanket onto my lap, pet a cat.
I love this room not because it is full of random material objects, but because it serves the same purpose as all of the aforementioned: it reminds me of who I am, what I value, what I need, what matters. In all of these ways—through time off work, through church, through my environment—I reposition myself, recall myself to myself.
We all have a thing that, even if we love it, sometimes takes us away from ourselves—and, by extension, from God. Mine is work. Yours might very well be children, or the demands of running a home or managing a large family. Maybe it’s caring for a child with special needs, or running a particular project (even, ironically, at church). We get absorbed; we lose focus; we forget what we’re doing when we’re not doing that.
Back when my grandmother was alive, she volunteered at a local hospital. She took her post at the front desk as seriously as a job: dressing up every day in a silk blouse and pearls, pinning on her hospital ID badge. The longer she volunteered, the more gold bars she racked up to attach to the ID pin until, at one point, she looked like a decorated military general.
When my mother’s car broke down at the mall one day while we were out shopping, my mom—down to her last dollar and desperate with my dad and his brother out of town—found a pay phone and called my granny. “Can you come get us?” she asked.
Of course she could. She was volunteering. Her role was to simply greet visitors coming in to the hospital.
But that’s not what my grandmother said. She paused. “Well…” Another long pause. “I’m working. And it’s important, so I can’t really leave right now. But I can come after work.”
My mother was crushed and so was I. At the time, neither of us understood how our immediate need could be anything other than the priority. She was volunteering, for heaven’s sake! But now I know: my grandmother was absorbed in something big, in something that mattered to her, and it carried her away from perhaps who she might have liked to be or what we might have expected her to be.
None of these things are evils in themselves. But God uses any number of things—and Sabbath especially—to call us back to who we are. The trick is, when we remember again, to carry that with us into wherever we go, and to let it shape what we do rather than to let what we do shape us.
Samaritan's Song 