My family and I left for Hawaii on the 9th of August, with plans for 4 days on Oahu and 4 on Kauai, with a travel day in the middle. Long before we left, I knew that I was desperately, profoundly in need of rest.
It has been a mad second half of the summer. All good, all blessings, but absolutely insane. Four hours in the car picking up kids from camp, followed by a two-day road trip to D.C. for the pastoral music convention, where I was involved in multiple breakouts and showcases. Leaving the convention early to fly to Chicago to meet my daughter and husband for the national Miss Amazing competition (which I packed my daughter for before I left home, including shopping trips. In the plural.). Five days at home, then a concert-storytelling event at a parish, and another five days at home before leaving for Hawaii. Pack. Return summer job uniforms. Drop off the broken bike. Schedule posts for two Substacks for three weeks. Arrange a psalm for a client.
All while I’m also prepping another novel for publishing this fall.
I am accustomed to managing a lot. The moment I realized I had finally discovered my limits—because they were way behind me in the rearview mirror--came while I was stuck in traffic in St. Louis, not even two hours into the trip to D.C., when I discovered I had left my tablet in the car back at home. The tablet that had all my presentations and all my music on it.
I keep pointing back to that moment because that was when I realized something has to change. As I chatted with a couple following my parish event on Aug. 2nd, they scolded me: “You just spent an hour talking about the need for rest. You need to take your own advice.”
“I know,” I told them. “I know it.”
“Hopefully Hawaii will be restful,” they said, and I nodded. That was my goal. Although for introverts with anxiety, just getting out the door on vacation is a stressor. Especially for a trip this big.
But Oahu was amazing, every moment of it except the part where we spent 30-45 minutes twice a day following the progress of a tropical storm in order to decide whether we could actually go to Kauai, or whether we needed to come back home.
You can imagine such discernments do not make for a very restful vacation. In our minds, Kauai was intended as four days for rest: get out to nature and hike, sit on the porch and look at the beach. Soul food.
Somewhere around 5 a.m. the morning I accepted that we were going to have to go home early, I had a meltdown in the hotel room. For a while I managed to keep it quiet, but eventually my weeping woke my husband. Then my daughter came over and I was sandwiched between them, fully aware of the riches of having two people who loved me trying to console me—but also inconsolable. Hours of mental work spent to figure out the planning of this trip—hours I didn’t have to spend in the first place, and now (apparently) wasted. All the work waiting at home, piles and piles of unfamiliar and thus stressful tasks related to book publishing. How am I going to rest if we go home and I’m right in the middle of it all again? I wept.
Into our last 24 hours on Oahu, we crammed a ridgeline hike and a luau. Both were delightful. But the hike, in particular, I approached from a mindset of rest, and it helped reconcile me to going home.
We flew out of Honolulu twelve hours before Lala hit the Big Island, landing in Vegas in the aftermath of a line of thunderstorms which backed up the airport for hours. The up side: a tight connection became a very relaxed one. The down side: losing time zones + a 4-hour delay meant we didn’t land in Kansas City until 2:30 a.m. We pulled into our driveway 15 minutes before my normal wakeup time.
What I knew, returning home to a completely empty refrigerator (we defrosted it before we left) and a mountain of work, was that God was using all this to make un-missable a message that I, in my type-A-Enneagram-1-ness, have been hearing for months but putting off addressing.
It is time to figure out how to rest, God was telling me. Not on a vacation. In your everyday. You cannot keep living like this.
For years, I have prided myself on “stacking” my time. Watch a movie while folding laundry. Listen to a podcast or an audiobook while cooking dinner. Write by the edge of the river (stacking exercise upon work upon prayer time).
Guilt is a real thing. The “luxury” of “staying home” becomes a whip cord at your back, pushing you to work, work, work. There’s this feeling that you have to justify those spaces carved out for rest by making them productive, too—because you know that most people work 40+ hour weeks, and can’t go take a bike ride in solitude. And sometimes, when you’re at the end of your rope, they remind you that you have a privilege they don’t, and then that, too, swirls around in your head. Because you, after all, are not bringing in a regular income. Your income is extremely irregular, and a lot of it involves investing up front in the hope, but not the guarantee, of recouping it.
And so, driven by love for your work but also driven by guilt, because why should you get to do what you love when it doesn’t pay? you aren’t actually earning your keep!, you work basically full-time and spend every other waking moment managing the family logistics. And you rarely get paid, because you’re a writer and a Substacker who sees this as a ministry and a parish speaker for whom income is exceedingly spotty and comes only after an ungodly amount of hustling to get speaking gigs.
And so on top of the rest, you heap guilt about being a freeloader, and lash yourself for being ungrateful, and you start viewing going outside to pull crabgrass as rest time, because at least you’re outside!
There are a lot of ways in which a driven person with many gifts can twist herself into knots.
I began my “I need rest even if I’m not on vacation and have hundreds of hours of work to do” week with a morning in my kayak. I meant to take work with me—a source text for a new piece of music. But when I couldn’t find the papers, I sighed and decided at least this way I’d for sure be resting.
On Thursday, I biked out to the river for the first time in over a month. It was absolutely beautiful, and after half an hour of sitting, I gave myself permission to open my laptop and work, only to discover that the battery was low. I got twenty minutes in before it gave out. I sighed and said, “Okay, God, message received.”
My vacation-not-vacation week is over now. I don’t have some big aha clarity, a slam dunk answer to the conundrum of “from those who are given much, much is expected” and the guilt, the compulsion to justify my time, that results from the difficulty of earning income from any of those “much”es. I don’t have an answer to the feeling of being a freeloader in my own life.
What I do have is clarity that I’ve got to figure out a better way to balance it all with the rest that makes us human, capable of grappling with discipleship in a world that looks more broken every day.
And I’ll bet some of you reading this need that clarity as much as I do.
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