take a holiday?

Okay, I'm sitting here and just realized the clock says 11:45pm . . . meaning I only have 15 minutes left in the day I'm supposed to post something here. It's crazy how even just the first day off for holidays can mess with your schedule enough that you forget things. Sometimes change from the "normal" schedule does that.

I've been thinking a lot about our need for times we take a break lately. I think it come from realizing that it had been almost two years since I'd taken more than a day or two at a time for holidays. So now to have a week and a half off seems strange.

But, I'm learning that sometimes we need to take breaks from the busyness of daily life. We need time to rest. We need time to rejuvenate. Sometimes we just need a change from the everyday life we live for a few days.

At a leadership conference I was at last week, one of the speakers said, "you can't sprint for 6 months, but you can for 6 weeks." He was talking about it within the ares where we lead, but I started thinking about it in life in general. I can give something everything I have for a short, set period of time, but I can't do that indefinitely. I need breaks from doing that if I'm going to survive.

But I wonder if somehow in our culture today we've gotten ourselves mixed up on this and we're trying to sprint indefinitely. And when we discover we can't do that is when the catastrophic happens in our lives. Something that can take us out permanently.

Maybe that's why we need to once again embrace the importance of taking breaks - of taking holidays. You don't have to go somewhere and spend a lot of money to take a holiday. This holiday for me consists of lots of things I can do within an hours drive. But, I'm taking a break from most of my normal, everyday life. Somethings go on, but much of it is put aside right now. And I'm doing other things I don't always do.

It's what I needed. Maybe it's what you need to. To somehow figure out how to take a break - to rest, to rejuvenate. Not an endless break, we'd get bored then, but a break with a set end date. Time to remember why we do what we do each day and to be ready to jump back in with new energy.