Life needs a rest. Wherever there is life, there must be rest. It is built in. Even fields must rest. Sure you could plant successive crops, but your soil and therefore your plants and the fruit of those plants will suffer. Humans certainly need rest. We are created with built in cycles in our being. One of them is resting one day every seven. Societies have tried to change the work week to get more work done and to rewrite the calendar as the French did. It didn’t work. Turns out that less got done. People got sick and tired.
I have a friend that moved to work for Intel decades ago. He told me that at Intel every 7 years (or 6 years, I can’t exactly remember), the company forced you to take off for 6 weeks. You couldn’t cash it out and you couldn’t break it up. That wasn’t vacation, you still had those days too! Did they know something? European countries think Americans are crazy because we start jobs with 1-2 weeks of paid vacation per year. The minimum for most European countries is 4 weeks your first year of employment. Paid! Many countries mandate more. While I am not for governmental mandates for things like this, I wonder if they know something we do not know. Maybe they get the principle that if a person has time off without the strain, stress and overload of work, they will perform better, be happier, be sick less and overall be more of a blessing to the company and the country. We live somewhere between Europe and Japan who so highly value production that the government now mandated in 2019, that people take off 5 days a year. Hello! Do you think that may contribute to the ultra-high suicide rate in Japan? People, (Terry), we need to take some time off!
How? Well, God has provided a way for me. I am getting 7 weeks off. I need to rest. I need to rejuvenate. I feel like this is my chance to do what I have preached for years but failed many times to engineer in my life. I have taken vacations, trips, and what I call adventures. (Camping vacations with a large family). Don’t get me wrong, those times were fantastic. They revived me. They were connective. They were rest. (Except the front side of the camping adventures J). I loved them, but I knew there needed to be more.
I feel like I am coming into my last half of life. I don’t know if I will live to 116, but I have a good 30 years left and I want to be different. It’s like a mid-life crisis without the sports car and trading in the wife. (Trading in the love of your life is just plain stupid). Although I would love a corvette, what I really have needed is a long enough time of ceasing from my work to perform a reset on my soul AND my body. In fact, since I am keeping the love of my life with me, it is a great opportunity to reset our love affair. The last of eight children will be a senior next year. Life has become different. A good different. I think this time will allow us to think deeper than we ever have before about our life and what we want to do for the next 30. (Or 40 or whatever God sees fit).
Rest. I have gone over the speed limit most of my life. It is time to park it. Well, I don’t like that picture. How about it is time to coast for a while with the energy of God pushing me instead of my engine working at too high of RPM. Yea, I like that. Jesus take the wheel…, and the accelerator and brake.