I am just coming to the end of the first week of my Sabbatical.  It has been a good week, but I am unable to comprehend fully the gift I have before me. So far, I feel that I have had week off and it will come to an end soon.  All week I have been fighting the urge to check email constantly. I have been wrestling with the thought that the phone will ring any moment as someone will need me, or have a question to answer.

I have been giving myself some grace as I adjust to a season of rest and sabbath.  The grace is needed as I already feel that I need to produce, something…anything.  I know I need to recalibrate around a desire to find value in being, rather than doing.

I am currently reading the book “Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives” by Wayne Muller.  In the chapter entitled “Rest for the Weary” he makes the following statement:

“I had always assumed that people I loved gave energy to me, and people I disliked took it away from me.  Now I realize that every act, no matter how pleasant or nourishing, requires effort, consumes oxygen.  Every gesture, every thought or touch, uses some life. 

…And so we are given a commandment:  Remember the Sabbath. Rest is an essential enzyme of life, as necessary as air.  Without rest, we cannot sustain the energy needed to have life.  We refuse to rest at our peril–and yet in a world  where overwork is seen as a professional virtue, many of us feel we can legitimately be stopped only by illness or collapse.  

…If we do not allow for a rhythm of rest in our overly busy lives, illness becomes our Sabbath–our pneumonia, our cancer, our heart attack, our accidents create Sabbath for us.”

I can relate to these quotes, all three of them.   I want to thank the Elders of Leduc Fellowship for the privilege to set time aside to rest, so I do not need to wait for something to take me out of action.