I was chatting with a few friends the other day about our trip to Kauai, and the car theft, and all that, and we got to talking about how important summer vacation is for all of us, and it led to some thoughts I wanted to share with you.

First, we really need vacations, just as we really need Sabbath rest each week. There’s a rhythm to life. The heart beats, then it rests. It beats, then rests. We wake each morning, then we sleep every night. We wake, then we sleep. We spend energy, then we take in food to replenish what we spent. Vacation is like that. We’ve got to have periods of rest and joy and beauty in our year.

So here is what we’ve learned about vacations:

First, ask God! Don’t just assume you know what is best this summer. Ask God what he’d have you do, and when, and with whom. Too many folks squander their vacation because they don’t ask God what he has for them. We went to Kauai because we prayed about it last winter, several times. “Where should we go, Lord? For how long?”

Visits are not vacations. Most folks spend their vacation time visiting relatives. That rarely is restful and restoring. Visits are not vacations. Don’t confuse the two.

Pray over your vacation beforehand! You know there is a thief. You know he hates joy. The mistake we often make is somehow thinking that vacation time is exempt from the Battle. It’s not. I spent weeks ahead of time praying over our Kauai trip – praying for safety. For the weather. For our travel. For our love as a family to be full.

Don’t spend your vacation running. Too many times the temptation is to fill the time with busy-ness, running here and there, touring, trying to “fit it all in.” Most folks get home and need a vacation from their vacation. Don’t squander it running around. We spent most our time within a few miles of the place we stayed. Resting. Being renewed.

Don’t drop your guard. The temptation when we get to wherever it is we were going for vacation is to drop our usual prayer life, drop our armor, and think “this is time out.” It’s not. To protect the time, I got up early every morning and prayed hard over the day. Don’t be lulled into a false security.
Okay. Now ask God what he has for you this summer.

So, we got back Tuesday morning from two wonderful weeks away on vacation. And already I can feel the old stress wanting to creep back in. There’s a ton of stuff to get done now. I can feel the sort of gripping pain in my gut that is an old, old mark of stress. Dangit. I don’t want to just throw it all back into “high gear.”
Is it inevitable?

Do we just get a taste of a different pace of life, but it doesn’t ever have a lasting effect?

I’m wondering – how can we make meaningful changes?

I mean, I have these sorts of experiences several times a year. I get away and get some perspective. I see my life from a different point of view, see some things I’d like to change. But over time the revelation fades, and it feels like I have to learn the lesson all over again.

I hate that. Doesn’t lasting change really happen? Is the Matrix inevitable?

So here’s what I’m thinking – what small changes can I make that would reflect the clarity I have, while I still have it? Before the revelation fades into the busy-ness of life, what can I do to go with it, run with it, make decisions that will help it linger?

Today, it was stop and have lunch.

I usually work through lunch, if I take it at all. I know its just a sign of that nose-to-the-grindstone mentality, and so today, I stopped and ate lunch without doing anythng else. Just lingered. “Wasted time,” so to speak. It’s a small change, but a significant one for me at least.

Now I’m going to leave early. Another small choice. A good one.

Sunday night about 11pm, just after we’d fallen asleep, somebody broke into the little house we are staying in on Kauai. They grabbed some cash from my wallet and Stasi’s purse, took the keys and stole the rental car.
Pretty crazy.

I mean, this is a small island. Where are they going to take a stolen car??

We didn’t realize the theft had occurred until about 6:30 the next morning. We’d gotten up early to head out to the Napali Coast, and couldn’t find the car keys. I thought, “Maybe I left them in the car,” went out to have a look, and there is no car! Then we find the window broken into, and the missing cash. At first, we were kinda shook. Not big time, but geez – to be broken into in a really small little cottage while we were barely asleep. Creepy. And the morning was filled with stress as we had to call the police, tell Hertz somebody stole their car, do the reports, get a ride back to the airport and get another car, all that.
But here is what is really cool – about an hour after noon we decided to just put it all behind us and go for a family outing. Thanks to the prayers and support of our friends, who really rallied around us, we were so free to just let it all go, don’t let it pull us down, and take the high road of walking with God through the rest of our vacation.

I was so struck by what a difference it makes in how we respond to the thief. Yes, sometimes he does steal, and there is no question he is trying to wreck a desperately needed vacation. But the thing is, we don’t have to let him then steal our joy, too. We really do have options on how we will respond. We really can take the high road, give it all over to God, and in the end we win because we hang onto our perspective, and our joy.

Somewhere in a cane field there’s an abandoned Mercury Mountaineer.

Meanwhile, we’re going for a swim.

We are resting on the north shore of Kauai, drinking in beauty and quiet. Sun and rain and ocean. It’s a pastel world, soft clouds, soft sea, soft sky.

It feels like a sort of de-tox. From the matrix we all take for granted. But don’t really notice its effect. Until we get away, and suddenly realize how overdue some rest is.

Our family reads a ton when we are on vacation. Stasi, the boys, all of us. We read most of the day, lingering in the shade. Last year I made the mistake of bringing the wrong books. War books, mostly, military history, including An Army at Dawn, about the early days of the United States Army in north Africa during WWII. It was a mistake because the last thing I needed to be reading about was war; I live at war, most every day, and the point of vacation is to get away from the front and the almost constant emotional vigilance it requires. Anyhow, I dropped the reading a couple days in because it felt too much like my life. But didn’t have any other books to take up.

This year I learned my lesson. Brought Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, read it in a day and a half, and loved it. (Now Blaine’s reading it). Moved on to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which brought me back to my old love of Shakespeare. And such a delightful and redemptive story it is. None of the darkness of Macbeth, none of the battle of Henry V. Interestingly (I only realized this today) they both take place on an island. And now that I think more about it, both stories turn on acts of mercy. Wow. God was just talking to me today about his mercy. And here I thought I just “chose” those books.
Sweet.

Okay, that's about all I have for now. Hope you are well.

Make sure you get some R&R this summer.

Monday night I’m driving down the road and suddenly my transmission just goes out.

I pull over (thankfully, I was on a back road) and put it in park, waited a second, put it back in drive, and off we go. I think, “Whew. Far out. Don’t know what that was, but glad it’s over.” About half a mile down the road it does it again. The usual sequence of “car trouble” thoughts and emotions begins to run, like this: “What the…?! O no. Doggone it” (this is the G version). Long deep sigh. Try a simple solution. That doesn’t work. Deeper sigh. Battle sweeping resignation, that whole “Why does life have to be so hard?” thing. Finally, I land on, “What am I going to do now?”

What made the trouble move from hassle to crisis was, I was four hours from home. What do I do now?

I put it in reverse, and drove back up the road to the neighbors. Asked if they had any transmission fluid. I’m hoping it’s a fluid issue. The fluid does register low, so I pour some in and limp back to the ranch. Call a local mechanic (he’s an hour away). He can’t even look at it for a week.

Now I’m faced with the dilemma of, “Do I stay here for a week, stranded, or do I try and drive it home and risk a total meltdown on the way, stranding me even further?” I begin to pray, to try and hear from God what I should do. But the drama of the crisis (“O no, I can’t be stuck here a week! And what if the repairs take even longer?! What am I going to do??!!”) is making it hard to hear from God. I find that’s almost always true – I find it really hard to hear from God when I am in high drama.

I try and calm down. Take a walk. I still can’t hear. At this point, I know pushing into hearing from God isn’t going to be helpful, so I do a little work around the place, let an hour or so go by. Settle down. I ask again, “Lord – what should I do? Stay? Try and make it home? What are you saying?” Part of what’s making it hard to hear is the fact that getting stuck here for a week is actually beginning to sound good to me. I get to skip out on life for a week. But the more responsible part of me knows this isn’t the time to cave in, and so I am trying to hear whatever it is God wants to say, and not just “go” with my growing desire to bail on life for a week with a beautiful excuse.

I hear God say, “You’ll make it home.” I said, “Really? Really? Lord, is this you?” “You’ll make it home.”
So, I risked it. Drove gently, didn’t push the transmission hard up the mountain passes, stopped halfway to check the fluid, and made it home. And I think to myself, “What was life like before I knew about hearing from God? I think I just navigated by trying to make good choices.” This is a much better life. God knows, by the way, and it really helps to ask.