So How Did the Time Away Change You?

Three months. Twelve weeks. Time in Elkhart and Michigan and Europe and on a ship and in Florida. Time alone. Time with Sharon. Time with the family and our granddaughters. What did it mean? What did I learn?

A friend who went on a sabbatical several years ago told that you really don't fully understand what God has done in you for several months or years after you have returned. I have this image of a sort of "time release" of truth and change that will keep going off for weeks and months.

Here are some things I noticed/learned:

• Stopping is good. Many of us are on a treadmill that moves too fast and it is good to stop. My relationship with God grew and deepened when I stopped.
• I felt "lighter." I am someone who has been pretty serious. A problem solver. Thinking about the big challenges facing us. And I discovered it felt good not to be constantly thinking through how every big problem could be solved. I discovered I felt "lighter" the more I trusted God to handle the world. I realized it is okay to stop...to smile...to laugh... to play...and not to carry the responsibility of the world around on my shoulders 24/7.
• Joy is cool.
• One of the best gifts God has ever given us is ourselves. Sometimes we let the person God made us to be get covered up...papered over...and we need to be good stewards of our own heart and mind and body and soul.

So I've come back and as I do I think I will:

• Work hard to focus on a few essential tasks God needs for me to do here at Trinity.
• Do my best to "fit" into the way God has been at work in my absence. The staff and our leaders have developed a new rhythm while I have been away and I don't want to get in the way of the good that is happening!
• Do less and do it better.
• Love God and continue to make an extended time with God the first thing I do every morning.
• Don't even look at email until I am well into the day, and not do any work on-line in the evening unless it is absolutely necessary.
• Head home earlier. Remembering the lesson of our neighbor in Mishawaka. Carlton was a farmer and when it was time for supper he turned off the tractor and went home. Even if he was close to having a field planted or harvested. There was a time to stop because the work was never done.
• Listen to less news in the evening.
• Watch less tv.
• Spend time each week beginning the writing ministry our leaders have been nudging me to undertake.
• Do my best to finish writing the sermon on Wednesday so that every Friday I get a full day off.

In Psalm 51 David says "teach me wisdom in my secret heart." Later, he goes on to say, "Fill me with joy and gladness." God is, I say with thanksgiving, doing both in my life right now.

Every morning I begin with this prayer: "Jesus, thank you for this morning and this breath. Give me a sweet and joyful spirit, a soft and compassionate heart, and the courage to say and be who you need me to be today."

"So Were There Any God Moments?"

That's the question a friend asked me at breakfast this morning. I've been away on a three-month Lilly Endowment-sponsored sabbatical and my colleague asked me, "So were there any God moments? Did God speak to you?"

A group of us was sitting at a table at Perkins and I stammered...searched for words. "Yes," I finally said, "there were a lot of God moments." All sorts of memories and moments and places ran through my head.

There was time on the beach at South Haven, Michigan. Right at the beginning of the clergy leave. Walking. Reading. Swimming. Spending the day on the beach. Taking a break for lunch and then going back. Until it was time for supper. And then returning to see the sunset and walk along the sand under the stars. Psalm 8 tells us that the glory of God taps us on the shoulder as we look up at the stars.

Shortly after that Sharon and I were at the Art Institute in Chicago. The room that stopped me was full of paintings by Monet. The artist had a way of catching the light. Finding the light. Even in a stormy seascape...there is light breaking out in the waves and sky.

We took several trips over and back to Columbus. Visiting Ella and Olivia. Going to a nearby park. Playing in the pink "Princess Castle" tent set up in the dining room. We spent some time at local lakes -Koontz and Webster- where we swam and I water-skied. All good. Both those little girls have a way of releasing my heart from whatever prison has locked it away.

There were eight days on a ship crossing the Atlantic. I was on my own...Sharon gets seasick. So I read and walked the deck and swam in the pool and attended a few lectures. Mainly, though, I looked at the water and sky. Journaled.

Sharon and I then spent the better part of a week with good friends in a small town 50 km from Stuttgart. We took the train to Florence where all three adults sons, and their wives and children, met us for a week outside the Tuscan city of Lucca. The house we had looked down on a small town...a river valley. We swam. We sat and talked. We made pizza in a wood-fired oven. (My attempts were a spectacular failures!)

One evening we took Olivia and Ella down to the piazza of a small town in the evening for gelatto. People in Italy come out of their homes for the evening. Old men on benches. Young couples on dates. Children riding bicycles in the plaza. All under a full moon. Another evening we went back and I ended up dancing with Ella outdoors as people did karaoke (which sounds about as bad in Italian as it does in English!). We danced and she laid her head on my shoulder.

There were two days in Rome with Michael while some of the family flew home and others
-including Sharon- went to Paris. The girls and us played in the city parks. The Eiffel Tower was three blocks away and was the first thing we saw when we opened the windows. Sharon and I walked into Notre Dame just as evening vespers began. Light was pouring through the windows of the great church and a beautiful soprano voice was calling God's people to prayer.

The last chapter of the sabbatical included a Miata trip south. The Spirit of God surrounded me, filled me, as I spent three days with Trappist monks in an abbey in central Kentucky. We worshipped in the middle of the night, early in the morning, the middle of the day, and in the evening. I walked...I journaled...and prayed. And God wouldn't let me step away from his presence...it was an experience of such holiness that I sometimes felt like my soul needed to shout, "Glory and enough!"

Right after that I spent several days in Nashville. Going to the string of country and western clubs on Broadway. Listening late into the night to all sorts of music. Surrounded by people who aren't the sort of people I usually hang out with. It was great! I laughed. There was this lightness, this playfulness, this delight in trusting God to take care of the world while I just enjoyed the music and the place, and it was good.

I drove on south towards Florida. Through Alabama on a moon lit night with the top down on the Miata. At the end we spent a few days in Fort Myers. Reading. Walking the beach. Eating grouper. And then we headed towards home. Through the mountains of north Georgia where we left the interstate and found a beautiful, winding river we might have otherwise missed.

There have been so many moments when God has been so close... One of the most powerful experiences with God, though, took place this weekend at Trinity. Being home. Being with you. Looking out and seeing your faces. Singing great songs. Seeing what Jesus has to say to us in Luke 12 about how we can move beyond worry and anxiety over money. God is here...the floor and walls and air hum with the Presence of the God who is Creator, Redeemer and Spirit. Jesus is all over this place!

It was good. Oh, there was a bump here and there, now and then, but it was good. I am so grateful you let me go. And I am so very glad you have loved me back!

Space and Water.

A friend told me that going on a sabbatical was disorienting. The first week or so my friend said that he, after putting down his role as a pastor, had to work to discover again who he was -down deep. At a basic level. Apart from his role as pastor.

I'm not sure about that but it is going to take several days for my "motor" to slow down.

Honestly, I am curious about what God is going to do during the next three months. I already feel lighter. For the last three days I have been in a coastal town in southwest Michigan. It's one of our favorite places. A lovely beach, a simple bed & breakfast three blocks from North Beach, a picturesque marina with boats lined up along a river that divides the town, and water that has been stirred up by a steady west wind. I've been walking, reading, swimming, and stopping. I want to enjoy my new iPod but the music of the water keeps me from inserting those earbuds and shutting out the world with the music of Mariah Carey, Mark Knoffler, Vince Gill, Puccini, or Bering Strait. As good as the music may be I'd rather hear the waves meet the sand.

Tonight I twice walked out on the jetty that leads out to a navigation light. The waves were rolling along the steel plates along side the breakwater. I found myself thinking about all the times when, as a young boy in northwest Alaska, I would wander down to the shore of the Bering Sea. There was something about the water that drew me.

When I need to be renewed, when I need to step away, I often find myself either on or near water. Not sure why. So tonight I walked the beach -after taking the risk of swimming in water that was more than bracing. Here I am walking along, watching, and swimming in Lake Michigan. Later in this three month journey I'll be spending 8 days on the North Atlantic. And, near the end of the clergy leave, I'll be in Florida...walking those Gulf beaches. Swimming in those warmer waters. (Assuming swimming in the Gulf of Mexico is still something people are allowed to do!)

Maybe it has something to do with those words in Genesis when we are told that the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God brought light out of darkness, form out of chaos, dry ground out of water. It's interesting that when people in 1st century Palestine people wanted a new start with God they went out to the Jordan River to be immersed in those tea-colored waters. Baptism in the waters of the river were a place where people began a new chapter. I even find myself thinking of the time in the Old Testament when a great Syrian general, who was suffering from an incurable skin disease, showed up and a Jewish prophet told the man -Naaman- to go bath in the waters of the Jordan River. Plain old water didn't seem like something God could use to heal something so serious, the great general thought.

But water can heal. Water seems to provide me with a space...and in that space God works.

God is.

It has been a good day. A beautiful day. A peace-full day.

Turning Out (& Turning On) the Light Switches

In a week and a half I head off on a 12-week Clergy Leave/Sabbatical. Which the Lilly Endowment Inc. is helping to pay for. So over the last few weeks I have been doing my ministry stuff at TUMC while at the same time taking care of planning details for sabbatical.

Part of what is going on, you know, is sorting out what I should be doing...and what my essential role is here at Trinity. Over the last week or so I have felt like a hiker who is unloading his pack. Sorting through it. Deciding what needs to be carried along in the trail and what needs to be left behind -or handed to others.

The sabbatical is nudging me to ask some tough questions about what it is I do at Trinity. Am I doing the right things? Am I doing too much? Am I getting in the way of others when they could do a much better job than me at some ministry task?

So I have been sorting through my pack. More and more I have been saying "No."

A friend in the community asked if I could help raise $50,000 between now and next Friday for something in the community. I said I couldn't do that.

Another person asked me to make contacts regarding a multi-million dollar campaign to rebuild our Christian camping facilities at Epworth Forest. Between today and next Friday. I said I couldn't do that.

A third person, a pastor in Southern Indiana, asked if I could pull together some ideas about recruiting young Christians into the ministry. I said, "No, I can't do that between now and next Friday."

So I am saying "No" a lot. Sorting things out. Putting things down. Handing things off. Or simply realizing that something isn't mine to deal with...worry about.

I told someone what I am doing is going around turning off switches. He responded, "When you get back think twice before you turn the switches back on. Ask yourself if you want to start doing what you were doing before you went away." It was good advice: I want to do ministry differently when I return in three months. Because sometimes I think I am working hard at good stuff while neglecting even more essential kingdom work.

Jesus talks about seeking first the kingdom. Which involves sorting. Making some decisions about life and priorities and time and energy.

I am turning out the light switches. And I will pray before starting to turn them on when I return.