Today I Took a Break

Today I took a break.

I was in the middle of my workday and had a few things on my to-do list that needed to get done, but I took a break. A lot of my work with writing, reading, and preaching is mentally exhausting. There are some days that I can write for hours and be super energized. But on other days, I can write just a couple pages and feel exhausted! 

I remember the first time I felt tired from using my brain was after taking my ACT test in high school. It was an hours-long test that was pretty important for college! Once I got home, I almost immediately fell asleep and took one of those naps where you wake up not knowing what day it is. I remember feeling like I needed to recover from taking the test. This was an unusual feeling. Before this, I had only felt tired or exhausted by physical activities, or occasionally had emotional fatigue. But from just thinking? Well, that was new!

Years later when I first started writing, my workweek dramatically shrunk from 5-6 days per week to just 4 or sometimes 3 days each week! Or even just to a few hours each day instead of a traditional 40-hours. 

I felt insecure about this at first. It actually made me feel like a bad writer because I couldn’t do it as much as any other job I worked. It made me feel lazy, especially knowing I’m an educated, able-bodied person capable of doing more. But then I remembered that more isn’t always better. Often, more is actually much worse! There’s nothing inherent about the amount of something that adds value to it. 

When I look at the life of Jesus, some consistent themes I see is the amount of breaks he took and how he valued the small. These parts of his story don’t get preached on as often. It’s not as sexy to talk about how Jesus rested when there’s a blind man seeing or a lame man walking. It’s not as inspiring to read about the value of finding one lost coin when thousands of people are being fed just a few verses later! Jesus took breaks often, and sometimes for a long time! He withdrew to the mountains, to the garden, to the boat, and sometimes it doesn’t say where, just that he left the crowds. He took a break from the people he had come to teach and heal. He valued the simple, small moments as much as the planned festivals. The holiest, most capable man that ever walked the earth probably also had the most consistent, clear boundaries with his work. 

There’s so much more to say about this topic and what it means for our lives. But if I wrote all of that in this one little blog post, I would have to take another break. 

And I just started working again after this first one!

Today I took a break. I remembered that I’m a human with limits. And thank God for that!