Now that we have another pastor on staff, I don\u2019t feel compelled to preach through coughing fits anymore. But still, every day this week,\u00a0I\u2019ve found reason to come in to the office. An appointment to keep, a funeral to plan, writing to get done,\u00a0phone calls to make\u2026I\u2019ve gone home early,\u00a0but have not been able to bring myself to take a full-fledged, off the grid sick day.<\/p>\n
I am not that micro-managing pastor who can\u2019t take a vacation. I ALWAYS use my vacation days. Even if i don\u2019t travel, I take a few here and there when family and friends visit, or after a major holiday, just to re-charge my batteries. But there is something different about a sick day. I can never quite bring myself to call it in.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m pretty sure it\u2019s because a sick day cannot be planned. <\/em>And I dearly love to plan things.<\/p>\n While sick days have been rare these past years, snow days have been non-existent. It snowed for like, ten minutes in downtown Phoenix this week, and you\u2019d have thought aliens were landing on the I-10. It was major news for every outlet that night. Kids who grow up around here have no idea what it is to go to bed at night, hoping against hope that mother nature will give them a free pass on the unfinished homework.\u00a0They\u2019ll never know that unparalleled joy\u00a0of waking in the\u00a0morning\u00a0to see the name of their school tick by on the bottom of the tv screen. To spend a weekday morning on the couch, in pj\u2019s, watching dumb tv and drinking hot chocolate? That is the stuff of fairy tales.<\/p>\n The mythical snow day cannot be ignored. No matter how much you want to get out of the house, or how much you feel you\u2019re \u2018needed,\u2019 nature gets the last word. And while the weather can certainly be an inconvenience or a danger, it can also be a benediction: an enforced day of rest that you were too stubborn to plan for your own tired, run-down-by-winter self.<\/p>\n In the last trimester of my first pregnancy, \u00a0I experienced an enforced sabbatical\u20137 weeks of bed rest. I remember feeling that I should <\/em>be able to accept the\u00a0downtime as a gift. A long rest to prepare for delivery and early motherhood, a brief pause in my working life, the space to simply be. But while my reasonal, rational and spiritual self knew these truths, my emotional, hormonal, real-person self was in a panic. I had no control over what was happening to my body, a helplessness reinforced with every doctor visit, every blood pressure check, every trip to the fridge or shower that left my head spinning and my heart pounding. (Ironically, stress is a major contributing factor to high blood pressure; so being stressed about <\/em>my blood pressure was probably causing the thing to being with. I swear, our bodies sometimes\u2026)<\/p>\n Add\u00a0your average about-to-become-a-parent worries about the health of the baby, and the reality that there was about to be\u00a0a tiny person in the world utterly dependent on me for food, comfort, and safety. AND the gnawing awareness that, while i endured daytime television and books i\u2019d read a thousand times, the church I served was suffering the effects of not having a pastor\u00a0around. \u201cHow many people were there on Sunday?\u201d i would ask the church ladies\u00a0who came by on\u00a0casserole rounds. They didn\u2019t want to tell me. They tried not to tell me. But I would eventually get it out of them, and every week the number got more alarming. \u201c50. 43. 36.\u201d (36 was a low point, folks. 36 is when you start wondering how much the property is worth, and how quickly after giving birth you can start looking for another job).<\/p>\n In the end, all was well. I gave birth to a baby girl, just two weeks early and weighing more than 7 pounds. Worship attendance has more than tripled since then (much like the size of\u00a0my baby girl, who is now 4). I now look back on that time in my life and wish i\u2019d been able to enjoy it more. I wish i\u2019d been able to recognize it as the gift that it was.<\/p>\n Thing is, nature has a way of enforcing a sabbath on us from time to time, by force of weather, or\u00a0by malfunction of our own fragile frames. And rarely does a sick day or a snow day fall at a convenient time. Unless we are 11 years old and jumping for joy at the school cancellations, we are always plagued with the gnawing sense that we might miss <\/em>something\u2026or that some\u00a0tenuous thing, utterly dependent upon us, will fall apart in our absence.<\/p>\n Downtime is\u00a0a gift. Even if we did not write it into our calendars, even if we cannot be the boss of it, an unexpected day of rest can always do our bodies good. Not to mention our souls.<\/p>\n What does it take to make us rest? For me, too often, it requires a great deal of planning ahead, and far too much of my own say-so. As I sift through a mountain of used tissues to find my computer today, I\u2019m mindful that I need to learn to let sabbath find me sometimes. A rest of the body that cannot be planned or contrived\u00a0is also a rest of the spirit, a rest in God\u2019s care.\u00a0\u00a0We\u00a0have only to accept it as the gift that it is.<\/p>\n
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