Sabbatical

7.11 am EST 

Sunday February 11, 2024

Nassau, Bahamas

What is a sabbatical?

  • By definition, a sabbatical is a period of paid leave granted to a teacher, or other worker for study or travel or rest. It is a biblical concept. God required the priests every few years to take time off.

Why would God require a sabbatical?

  • A sabbatical is a time that provides a step away. Cessation of activity in our daily routine- much like sleep provides a cessation of activity to refuel, to rest, to recharge, to re-energize. It is a similar concept, but extended.

What are the goals and or benefits of a sabbatical.

  • Probably the number one goal is to step outside normal routine so the mind will flow in a new direction. It’s to step away for a period of time of a month or even up to a year. Some sabbaticals last longer than that.
  • For me it’s a time to evaluate and look back over the last 25 years while I have been in Washington. What are the achievements and lack of achievements? What are the successes and what are the failures? It is critical to remain unbiased and fair with yourself. I want to be honest with myself!
  • It is a time to re-prioritize. To look at what you’re spending your time doing and what are the results of that. It’s a time to remap your future. To sift through your responsibilities and ask yourself which of them are the most important? Am I spending enough time on those? Am I being derailed by less important things? Going forward how do I need to change the map of my life? What do I need to delegate to others? Is there any area of my life that I need to restructure?

So that is and was my purpose. To take time to let life slow down. To let the mind be at rest. To provide an opportunity for my thoughts to be creative. It is a time to say to yourself and to those you are responsible to, whatever amount of life I have left, how do I spend it?

After I was in Madera, for 10 years, I took a 30 day leave of absence or sabbatical if I can use that term. Personally, I feel like it was a turning point in my life. It prepared me for the major life things that I would encounter that I didn’t know were coming.

As I began to approach the 25 year mark in Washington state, I felt I needed that same getaway time to refocus, re-evaluate, and re-prioritize.

Looking back over 25 years, I want to appreciate and celebrate every success and accomplishment that we have had. All church success is a joint effort between God, a pastor, and a congregation. God will not do it by himself. A pastor cannot do it by himself. A congregation is not capable of doing it by themselves.

A sabbatical is not a vacation. There is a major difference. A true sabbatical means a break from your work. It is an extended period of time to travel or rest, and seek personal growth.

For me, I felt the need to look back at 25 years and assess it. I felt the need to look at what had been done, to see the things that I felt good about, and then look at the areas I could have done better. 

The second purpose was to analyze as best I could, what I could do going forward. As I age and my physical limitations began to show up, I felt the need to stop and say – what can I still do well and how can I contribute?

I am very thankful to all the people who make our church work. There are so many that contribute daily, weekly, and monthly. I want to be very careful, that I not take credit in my own mind for what they have done, for it is truly their achievements. Many, if not most of these, people would have had achievements no matter who had been the pastor here. I realize my primary job is to bring out the best in those that I am responsible for. To try to build them to be better. To try to maximize their life and accomplishments.

In my opinion we have a good church and we have good membership. I accept the fact I could have done things better. When I look inside myself, I know that I have tried. That is not an excuse. That is an honest evaluation. Going forward I want to continue to be honest with myself, and to give my best effort, as long as I am the pastor.

I realize what I contribute in my 70s will be different than what I contributed in my 50s and 60s. As simple as it may sound, I still want to give the best of what I have to offer. Possibly there are some ways I can offer more because of experience. That is my hope.

It is believed that a sabbatical offers an opportunity to invest in personal leadership. Reading the reports and testimonies of people who took sabbaticals, they generally report greater self clarity. They report restored confidence in their skills, and usually return with a fresh outlook and energy. It seems like they are able to go back to the core of who they are, and to shed some of the barnacles of life that tend to attach themselves to all of us.

In the year 2018 15% of the academic world allowed and recommended sabbaticals. Why?

Reduced stress is one benefit. 

In September 2022 I was on an airplane flight to Arkansas to preach at Dr. Scheel’s meeting. My Apple Watch gave me a notification that my heart rate had dropped to 30 and had stayed there for 10 minutes. After this alarm, I went to the doctor and they ran tests. This morning I counted up the days since that happened. It’s been 17 months or actually 513 days. Not once during that 513 days did I sleep one night without my heart dropping to 30 beats a minute. It usually occurred 2 to 3 times a night and my Apple Watch would always notify me.

This morning when I woke up, I checked my heart rate as I have for the last 500+ days. Maybe it is a coincidence that this happened during this sabbatical, during this time of getting away and trying to allow myself some mental rest, but for the first time in 513 days my heart rate was normal all night long for a solid eight hours. The range was from 50 to 60 bpm which is a normal range. It has been normal for three consecutive nights at this writing.

Will this continue I don’t know. All I’m trying to say here is thank you for giving me this opportunity to decompress, to reflect, and to look to the future, and try to remap by taking this short sabbatical. I had accepted the fact over the last 17 months that low heart rate at night would be my new norm for as long as I lived. Today I am very thankful that that might not be the case.

God Bless