On Sabbatical

And on the seventh day, even God rested, which was meant to teach us a pattern of rest. May will be the seventh month since the ebola outbreak was announced last November, and with the Uganda year-round school schedule giving our kids a holiday, it seems to be a good time to fulfill the wise mandate from our mission leadership that we also rest. Tomorrow we head out, first to Kampala to work on renewing our work permits (the visas that allow us to stay in Uganda year after year) and then next week to Zanzibar. We were looking for remoteness, quiet, water, privacy, visual peace, renewing beauty, and we think we have found it in a beach-front house on the coast of the Indian Ocean. When we were floundering about what to do and where to go, the owner of this home wrote and offered us a great deal for our three-week stay (it’s rainy season, but what can you do about that if your kids are off school in May) that made it very affordable and was worded in such a way that we sensed God’s hand in the opportunity. So for three weeks we will be on sabbatical, just our family. Thanks to visitors and packages we’ve managed to accumulate 22 brand new unread kid/teen great books, which means our readers can devour one per day in between swims in the ocean. That’s our basic plan: swim, walk, read, talk, process, pray, sleep.

First though, we have to make it out of Bundibugyo, which with just over 12 hours to go still feels intimidating and by no means certain. With a few days in Kampala on either side of the three weeks, not to mention a full day of driving just to get to Kampala each way . . .we will be away from home a month. That means lots of planning ahead for the complex web of relationships, workers, patients, team, friends . . . Even our two cows and our dog. It is not easy to walk away, and though we know we desperately need time to focus on our kids, each other, our own souls before God . . . It is not without considerable guilt that we pull away from the glaring needs here for so long. It steels me to know that Jesus did the same thing, even when the crowds demanded food and leadership, he disappeared into the mountains to pray, and I’m sure some children died while he was up there that He could have saved. We do our best to leave contingency plans and supplies, but eventually we have to just go. It is particularly wrenching to leave our elderly and ill neighbor, and we do so praying that he will hold on until we return.

The place sounds relatively rustic and remote, so I have no idea if we will be fully unplugged . . . If so, then come back in late May to visit this site again. In the meantime pray that we would spend the next three weeks in this way (from Marva Dawn’s Truly the Community)
Central to our theology, then, is giving up our attempts to love . . . The first epistle of John essentially describes how love can be without hypocrisy . . Can we grow in love by trying to love more? No, our attempts to love will only end in more frustration and less love. The solution, John implies, is to know God better. This is so simple that we miss it all the time: our means for becoming more loving is to know God better.

Pray that rest would allow us to soak up God’s presence, and in knowing Him better we would return to our life with love.