STOP.

Dear WRC,

I’ve never been very good at knowing what I need, and I’ve often been even worse at asking for it from those around me.  Maybe it’s because I’m a middle child who internalized a need to make and keep peace, not to disturb or inconvenience others when I could just bear it myself.  Maybe it’s because I’m a 5 on the enneagram and tend to live in my head—I’m seldom aware of my feelings—always watching the world and attempting not to be seen myself.  Whatever the cause, I’ve been feeling for a while like something was off but haven’t known what to do about it.  First, I noticed that my mental bandwidth had shrunk—I wasn’t able to keep as many balls in the air and remember and juggle things the way I was used to.  Then I noticed that my emotional bandwidth was disappearing, too—in some places I noticed my fuse was shorter, in others I noticed apathy or disconnection.  More recently I have noticed that my spiritual bandwidth has also been sapped—I struggle to sit in silence, it is hard to sit down and pray. 

The more I began to notice these things creeping in, the more I began to wonder what to do about them.  I figured they had to do with the toll of the pandemic, but I didn’t really know what to do about it all.  The Doctor of Ministry work provided some reprieve and energy, but it felt like a band-aid on a larger wound.   With the worst of the pandemic seemingly behind us, I assumed that if I just kept going my “tank” would slowly refill, but, just as it sounds, that wasn’t a very hopeful direction.

Then I got an email.  It was from an old friend of ours, Billy Norden, our former Associate Pastor who now works for the RCA’s Board of Benefit Services.  It was a mass email to churches and pastors announcing that they had just received a grant from the Lilly Foundation to offer something they were calling “Clergy Revitalization Grants”.  These grants would fund 2-3 week “Mini-Sabbaticals” for pastors in 2022 to help fight against the growing wave of clergy burnout as a result of these last two years. 

Suddenly there it was clear as day: this is what I needed and this was how to ask for it: sabbatical.  Not a vacation, not just a break: sabbatical, “A Sabbath to the Lord your God” (Exodus 20:10).  There’s not room here for a thorough explanation of the concept of Sabbath but it is essentially an invitation to stop for God.  Eugene Peterson writes, “When we work we are most god-like, which means that it is in our work that it is easiest to develop god-pretensions.  Un-sabbathed, our work becomes the entire context in which we define our lives.  We lose God-consciousness, God-awareness, sightings of resurrection… We must stop running around long enough to see what he has done and is doing.  We must shut up long enough to hear what he has said and is saying” (Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, 117).  My soul screamed: “THAT is what you need!” To stop running around long enough to see what God is doing; to shut up long enough to hear him, too.  To stop.

With great hesitation I approached our Personnel Committee and then our Consistory with the idea.  It is even harder to ask for what I need than to know what it is, and you have already been so generous and supportive.  I told them I needed someone to care for my soul for a little while, space to seek God.  We talked about what that would look like, what it would mean. The conversation was filled with love, encouragement, and support.  They encouraged me to apply and several reached out afterwards to show even more love and a desire to help.  Even just by talking about it, hope began to spill in over the horizon.

There are two points to this letter—and neither is a backwards way of inviting sympathy.  First, I want you to know that I was awarded one of these grants and will be away on a mini-sabbatical from July 11-31 in order to stop and listen and seek God.  The second is actually more important: to invite you to wonder what you need and how you can ask for it.  Maybe you need something like a sabbatical, too.  Maybe you need a more firmly established weekly practice of Sabbath.  Maybe you need to talk to someone and be cared for—a therapist, a spiritual director, your pastor.  Maybe it’s something else entirely.  Maybe you don’t even know what you need.

God used an email to give me the gift of seeing what I couldn’t see, to answer prayer.  Maybe this letter can do the same for you.  Or maybe God will use something else this week.  Or next.  God is always working and always up to something, if we have the imagination to see it. Whenever and however that invitation comes, I hope you’ll take it.  I hope you take it as an invitation deeper into the heart of God, to come to the one who offers rest, real rest, to all those who are weary and carrying heavy burdens.

In Christ,

Pastor Andy