How do you get in the pool? Do you sit on the edge and dangle your feet for a while and then slowly make your way via the steps into the shallow end, allowing the water to creep up a millimeter at a time until you are in to your desired depth? Or do you get a running start and dive in head-first?
When it comes to pools, I’m a head-first, big splash kind of guy. When it comes to a return to work from vacation, I am still basically sitting on the patio, thinking about taking off my shoes and socks. I am writing these words in that liminal time, between the last day of vacation and the first day formally back at work. I couldn’t turn off my thoughts about sermon preparation and it was way too sultry to play outside, so I started cracking commentaries and seeing what ideas I could steal generate for my first post-vacation sermon.
Being off for two weeks does not in the least bit break old routines; as soon as I sat down at my desk, I was back to my old routine. (Which means that I was not racing to get my new creative ideas committed to paper, so don’t get too excited about a terrific sermon waiting for you from the fresh, invigorated pastor you hoped might appear where I previously was found. Nope, expect the same old stuff you are used to hearing: white noise that cures insomnia.)
I can’t say I was enthusiastic about returning to work or that I had been missing the assembly-line regularity of being creative a couple times a week until the next week off, but I wasn’t feeling blue or resentful either. I was just sitting down to the task like a grown person who has long ago realized that ‘endless summer’ is a Beach Boys fantasy.
But you know who was tickled pink for me to get back to work? My cat, Oliver. His super-cat hearing picked up the sound of keys clacking on the laptop and before I knew it, he had heaved his 21 pound cat carcass up onto the desk and was ensconced on the keyboard with his motor running. He knows that when I sit at the desk he can always find a space to lay down and almost always he gets some serious scritching – the pathway to kitty Nirvana.
As he lay there, entirely covering the laptop keyboard, I was struck on just how good it is to stop, just stop. Stop reading, stop writing, stop thinking, stop worrying and just be grateful for a moment that makes you glad. Oliver gave me one more vacation at the end of my vacation.In the weeks to come, whether I am ready or not, whether I feel like I need a break, or whether I need to meet a deadline, I know Ollie will impose a vacation on me.
I hope I know enough to let him purr and let me pray a word of thanks for the gracious interruption.
Prayer: For this good life, for this blessed moment, I thank you. Amen.