Greetings and salutations!
It’s been a minute. I stepped away from the J-Blog a little while ago, because I just wasn’t feeling it. There weren’t enough hours in the day to keep up with the writing, and it didn’t feel like a whole lot of people were reading. So in the busy-ness, I decided it was best to step away. I mean, it wouldn’t make any sense at all to come back unless there were some kind of global pandemic health crisis that forced us all to stay inside and keep away from our day to day work lives.
And so I dusted things off, gave the website a bit of an overhaul, and got ready to start writing.
Let’s be honest, these are really strange times. The entire nation has been shut down for about 6 weeks, and we’re starting to have conversations about what coming back out from quarantine would look like. Almost everyone agrees that whatever comes after this, we will likely never see again what we used to call “normal.” Our lives are changed, in ways both good and bad, and there’s not much we’ll be able to do about some of those changes being permanent.
For my part, I’ve leaned in hard on the “media pastor” part of my job description. I’ve been working with Westminster to create videos of our worship experiences, conduct youth group and other events over Zoom, spent an alarming amount of time trying to figure out the ins and outs of Zoom, and even some daily vlogs, all with an eye to keeping folks connected. It’s been a lot of work, and a lot of good creative work. But sometime around Sunday this week I started to notice that I was wearing down. For as much as I have been working from home, I haven’t had a day off in about 3 weeks. Looking over the calendar, I could safely count back 21 days before I could come across one where I hadn’t spent any time working on something, and I was starting to feel it in my body. I was tense, I was tired, and I was cranky.
So today I set aside as a day to do no work. I haven’t let myself check my e-mail. I haven’t opened the church’s YouTube page to check stats. I haven’t been learning the latest features of Zoom. I slept in for a while, played with the boys when I woke up, and read my book and watched the bird feeder with Sarah while they napped. It is always difficult to turn things off, to actually allow myself the kind of rest I need by intentionally staying away from work. It’s an even bigger challenge in this season where the lines between home and work have blurred into oblivion. But I can’t tell you how big a difference this day off has made for me. It has felt like big gulp of fresh air, the kind we used to get all the time when we could grocery shop without a mask.
I write all of this because I feel like there’s no possible way I’m alone in this. I’ll bet that more than a few of my friends have been working for 3+ weeks without a break, driven to try to maintain things and keep their work vital in this strange season. I know that it seems counter-intuitive, but the more rest we allow ourselves to get, the better able we will be to do our work. I am quite certain that tomorrow I’m going to be able to attack my work with three times the energy and passion than I would have if I woke up today and tried in this weary and tired state. Maybe God was on to something when he came up with that day of rest business?
I’m going to tinker around here on the website for a bit, because that gives me life and rest. While I’m at it, a few self-promotion things:
We’re going to do a live worship jam every Friday night at 6:00 over at Westminster’s YouTube Channel. If you haven’t already, feel free to leave a request in the comments sometime before tomorrow and noon and I’ll do my best to make it happen!
Tyler and I are still getting fresh episodes of Roughing The Pastor out to the masses, so make sure that you subscribe to get the latest and greatest.
I highly recommend a bird feeder to deal with stress. I always wanted a pet bird, and my mom always said no, so this is the closest I’ve gotten. And it rocks!
Till next time,
J