Unwinding

August 4, 2019

“There’s no play until the work is done.” I cannot tell how often I heard those words when I was growing up. It was a mantra my parents believed and lived. They expected us to live by it, too. My folks must have done a pretty good job of ingraining that value into me, because to this day, it’s hard for me to take time off if the job isn’t finished. Problem is, Christian ministry is never finished, which makes it easy to crash and burn if I’m not careful. Church history is littered with the wreckage of pastors who were so busy taking care of others that they never took the time to feed their own souls. 

A wise man once said, “People don’t break the Ten Commandments; they break themselves upon them.” The Fourth Commandment is just as important as the First or the Seventh, but American Christians have by and large, shelved the idea that we need dedicated time to stop all activity and listen for the still, small whisper of the Holy Spirit. I suspect it’s one reason our faith at times can be so anemic. We keep the strings wound so tightly that they eventually snap. Moral and ethical collapse doesn’t happen overnight. A little indiscretion here, a tiny compromise there build up silently, behind the scenes, till like a dam that’s finally breached by rising waters, the failure is catastrophic.

Like so many Sundays, I preached this morning. This evening, I’ll read through the book of Zechariah to get the overview of this prophet’s message. Tomorrow I’ll dig in and begin working on the sermon for next Sunday. In between, we had dinner with the family, a bit of rest this afternoon, and a picnic and cornhole tournament with Park church’s worship teams and their families. I didn’t count, but I’m guessing there were thirty or forty people having a good time together. I need afternoons like this. For many years, two sermons on Sunday morning were followed by a Sunday evening service. It was hard gearing up for that evening time, but we did it because “there’s no play till the work’s done.” Mine was done by noon today, after which I put it out of mind. Tomorrow I pick it up again, but right now I give thanks for time to unwind. It’s been a good day.