I know it sounds crazy, but we are going to take a vacation this year, so help me sweet baby Jesus. After a lot of years of work in the church, we’ve tried both taking a vacation and not taking a vacation, and it turns out that not taking a vacation is a foolish, might I even say stupid thing to do. But you don’t really realize how stupid until January or February when the weather and your overall hatred for all your fellow man comes into full flower. I thought this was universally known, but I literally just saw this insanity on twitter–9 Things Highly Effective People Do After They’ve Been On Vacation.
I might like to quibble about the universally accepted moral good of being ‘highly effective,’ and what even does that mean, but for the moment I just want to leap past the specious advice to ‘meditate’ and ‘spend part of Sunday night laying out your goals for the week’ and say some helpful words about this stupid stupid stupid advice,
9. Actually, maybe don’t stop working.
Finally, some truly American advice: Don’t take a real vacation in the first place.As bad as this sounds, it’s what many of us are doing anyway. (And it’s the key to why I think we can paradoxically be on vacation every day, as I describe in this article.) But Michael Massari, senior vice president of national meetings and events for Caesars Entertainment, came out and said what I think a lot of us are thinking.
“Don’t be afraid to blend in work during your vacation. Take advantage of the technology we have available today, such as Zoom, Skype, and mobile email, to stay productive,” he says. “This also allows you to go on more vacations for longer amounts of time while not jeopardizing your productivity.”
Yeah, I know. I’ve totally tried this. I’ve gone through periods, indeed I’m in one now, where, for reasons I can’t really piece together, I can’t ever seem to stop working, not even for a few minutes. This is dumb because I’m not the owner of a company, I have no important, critical-for-humanity’s-survival-project in the works, I am not a doctor or a nurse, I am not, in other words, that essential a person in the grand scheme of things.
And you know what, neither is the rest of humanity. All of us are going to die. One by one we go down to the grave. Going on a vacation where you actually stop working for a few minutes is a tiny acknowledgement of that reality. It’s a nod to the sovereignty of God and the length of human history to go sit in a chair and stop answering all the email all the time. It’s a way to say to yourself that you are dust and to dust you shall return. And that when you do return to the dust, the world will still be here and so will all the paper work and phone calls.
That’s the insanity of all the technology that lets you stay in touch no matter where you are or what you are doing. It’s existence must be proof, Proof I tell you, that it ought to be used. But if that’s true than you yourself would have already gone mad. Everything that exists is not good just by virtue of its existence. No, put down the phone, go sit in a chair, stop working for a few minutes and consider the precious gift that someday you’ll die and that then you’ll not only not be able to work, you won’t even have to think about it!
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