Transition

This is the time of year for transition, kids are going off to school (some already have), college students are returning to their dorms, teachers are prepping their classrooms and professors are putting the final touches on their syllabi. Some the weather will change and autumn will be upon us.

I am transitioning.  Not only am I preparing my girls to go back-to-school next Tuesday But I am beginning to think about the Fall at the church. I am wondering about the plans for our annual Neighborhood Cookout which the second Sunday after I return. I am beginning to think about my first Sunday, my first sermon, and my first board meeting. I will walk into the church for the first time in twelve weeks on the 11th. I still have a week and a half.  I am thinking about my church again. I am thinking about re-entry.

Next Tuesday the kids go back to school.  Next week is my last week of sabbatical, in fact I will write my first sermon in three months, my sabbatical officially ends on a Sunday. I am excited about that. As much as I have enjoyed the leisurely pace of a Sunday morning where all you have to do is get your and yours there, I miss preaching. I love studying scripture, I love finding what it is God is saying to us this week and bringing that to my congregation. It is my favorite thing about pastoring.

I am also thinking about how I will be different. I have taken three months, I have rested, I have contemplated, I have thought, I have read and I have dreamed, now I need to take the person I have become back. I can not allow myself to return unchanged, to slip back into who I was. I need to allow this sabbatical to shape who I am, who I am becoming and take that person back to the pulpit, to the study, to my people.

I want to be a new pastor, a better pastor, a pastor with a new vision. These last days are the transition. Before I left, there was a time of transition where I set everything up for me to leave, where I prepared myself and the congregation for my absence. I set goals for my sabbatical, some of them I have kept, some of them have fallen to the wayside, but I did not just wander into my sabbatical and hope that it would all go well. Likewise, I can not just wander back into my office and hope that things will go well. I need to prepare. I need to be intentional, set goals, think about the person who is returning.

One of the reasons I am backpacking at the end of the summer is because something happens on the trail. Somewhere between immersing myself in nature and pushing myself to near physical exhaustion, I am able to think better. I am hoping that putting this trip at the end of my sabbatical will allow me to process and think about what it means for me to return. To nail down how this sabbatical has changed me and what that means for my future ministry.

So today and tomorrow as I pack my pack and gather my gear, I am not only preparing for my annual backpacking trip, but I am preparing myself to return to my congregation and preparing myself to process all the things I need to process as I move back into "everyday" life.

A Wedding, Two Birthdays and a Funeral

I spent the last two weeks in Maryland, which is where my parents and two of my sisters live. This was the last major trip of my sabbatical. (I only have less than three weeks and my two day backpacking trip left.) Hard to believe that the Summer and my sabbatical are both almost over.

I usually visit with my parents sometime during the Summer but this Summer I planned my trip around a wedding. A young man who attended our church while he was at Harvard Law asked me to participate in his wedding as a wedding sponsor (sort of like a wedding God-parent - I presented the couple with a Bible as a part of the ceremony) this Summer and of course I agreed. My 40th Birthday was less than a week after the wedding so I was also able to be home with my parents and my sisters for my 40th Birthday (my husband and I will celebrate this weekend).  The trip also coincidentally coincided with my nephew's 13th birthday. So I went home for a wedding and two birthdays but then there was a funeral and as funerals tend to be, it was completely unplanned.

So on Friday I was a wedding sponsor for a couple as they began their life together, on Saturday my nephew turned 13, marking the beginning of the teen years for him and essentially his last stride toward adulthood, on Sunday I officiated at my aunt's funeral marking the end of her life, and then on Wednesday I celebrated my 40th birthday which theoretically marks the mid-point in my life. All I needed was a birth and I would have had a representative sample of all of life's major turning points that mark major changes in a person's life. A wedding, becoming a teenager, mid-life birthday and a death.


As my sabbatical is moving toward a close I cannot help but think more and more about my congregation. I miss them. I wonder what they have been doing. I wonder what it going on in the lives of the people I have grown to love over the past several years. I think about my ministry there. My role as pastor and I think about who we are as a congregation.

Weeks like this make me think about life in general. In many ways that is the point of sabbatical, taking the time to think about the path you are on.  The path direction of your ministry, the path you are taking as a person, as a pastor and the path you are journeying along with the members of your congregation.
With the differing events of the last week, I can not help but think, "What kind of marker is my sabbatical?" For my own life, as well as that of my congregation. I know it is a mid-life marker but how do I want this mid-life moment to shape my life and who I am for the second half of my time here on this earth. For a congregation it is sometimes hard to tell where we are on along the path that marks the life of a congregation. Are we a teenager, also struggling with identity but no knowing who we are, who we want to be, not understanding the changes we are going through and not fully comprehending what the future can or perhaps should hold for us? Is this a new beginning, not a wedding - but moment where we make a conscious choice to become something new? Are we having a mid-life moment, where we evaluate and re-evaluate who we are and who we want to be as we mature?  I wonder if we can chose?  What kind of moment do we want to have?

But my questions are not just for them. They are also for me. Who am I?  Who am I becoming? How can I actively shape my future so that I become the person I want to be, and not just allow the waves of life to take me to and fro, washing ashore where ever. I need to a rutter, I need to be at the helm of this ship that is my life.  I can not be adrift, I am capable of setting a course, plotting a route and taking it. I can and should do that. I can choose what kind of moment this is, a new beginning, a moment that marks a new future, a change in how I think about who I am and who I am becoming.

I will go boldly into the next forty years. I will not be passively riding along, but actively engaging this life and the direction I am taking into the future. I am not talking about not being lead by God but seeing where God is leading and directing and not just hoping (and praying) I will end up there, but actively moving in that direction, boldly grasping a hold of the journey and getting there, not just for me, but for my family, for my ministry for the congregation God has placed in my care. Using wild boldness to become the person, the mother, the wife, that pastor, the congregation God is calling us to be.

Finding Relaxation

We spent a week in Maine. A pastor on my district invited us to stay at his family's lakeside cabin for a week. It was wonderful. It was beautiful and I think it was probably the best week of my sabbatical thus far.
We arrived on Sunday evening and left on Friday morning. For one week we were planted. We did go into town once for food, but other than that, we did nothing. Went no where. We made no plans and scheduled no outings. We just stayed there. We began our mornings with reading and ending our evenings reading. Other than reading there was the lake, and there were canoes and kayaks. We all took turns in the two kayaks but Stella enjoyed it the most. She went out in the kayak at least once a day, sometimes more. We spent hours during the day reading, as well as enjoying the water.

There is really not much I can say about the week. This was the week we really did relax.  I read five books. All fiction. I was planning on bringing at least three "work" books. But when Mike saw me putting them into my bag, he advised me to leave work behind. All Summer, no matter where I have gone, I have brought at least one fiction and one work book with me and often times several of the later. I think he was mainly just asking me to pare down the amount of books I as toting around but I think the idea of really leaving all work behind, which is what we did, was really for the best.

This was the first week I really relaxed. I know it sounds odd, here I was halfway through my sabbatical (the Sunday we left marked the halfway point - I was six Sundays in and had six left) and had not really let myself go and completely relax.

In many ways I have been worried if I was doing sabbatical "right"? Was I doing what I was suppose to do? Was I doing the things that would benefit my congregation? This is suppose to benefit them as well as myself. I want to do right by them. I have taken time each week to read books that intended to help me become a better pastor, a better leader. I have worked to be intentional with my time, my energy, my activities. But what I learned last week was that I have not been relaxing, truly relaxing.

Last week I caught a glimpse of what that fells like, what that looks like. I am sure that truly relaxing looks different for different people, but for me it meant sitting in a hammock and reading a book, watching the ripples on the lake, watching the sun as it came up over the trees and tracing as it made it ways toward setting. It meant learning how to operate a kayak and watching my daughter figure out that is really good with this same new skill. It meant watching my girls play in the lake and joining them at time. It meant cooking when we became hungry and going to be when I was too tired to read by lamp light anymore and then waking up when the sun woke me up to do all that over again. No where to go, no plans, no agendas, nothing that needed to be done, outside that which provided for our nourishment and our immediate needs.

Somewhere there on that hammock, along a lake, I found relaxation. All the stress was gone. All the worry, all the press of day to day life, were gone. And I learned to just be where I was, to enjoy the sun on my face, the story in my book and this particular moment in my girls' lives. And for one week I was there for it all. I was not thinking about what I needed to do next. I was not making plans for the next thing. I just let all that be back in Boston and I stayed there by the lake and let the week be what it was. And it was great. Nothing exciting to write about. No great revelation, no clear picture of the future. I just learned to be there, at that moment and to enjoy it for all that it was worth.

My great accomplishment of last week was, after six week of experiencing several different levels of rest, I learned what it looked, felt like; what it was for me to really and truly relax.