Sabbath Habits
“Don’t do it Jess. Don’t go back to the life you lived prior to COVID-19.”
My friend gently spoke these heavy truths to me as we both sat outside a coffee shop after I had texted her asking could she meet up last minute.
I arrived at the coffee shop, ordered my drink (iced oat milk vanilla latte), and sat down and waited.
I thought to myself: “I’m going to lose it. As soon as I see her, I am going to lose it.”
This friend of mine is the one that I cannot, literally cannot, hide who I am in front of her. The one that I can be going along just fine and she asks a question with just the right words and intonation that I am all of a sudden crying because she saw what no-one (not even myself) could see.
She arrived, went and ordered her coffee, sat down and I just heaped my hurt/exhaustion/overwhelm and every other emotion onto her. I told her of the stress I was feeling, the pressure I was living under all the while tears streamed down my face. I didn’t care who saw, I needed to get it out. I needed to be seen and heard down to the depths of who I was and this was the person I could do that with.
She sat patiently and let me divulge everything that had happened and how I felt about it all. As I started to regain composure, I looked at her and she said:
“Don’t do it Jess.”
“Don’t go back to the life you lived prior to COVID-19.”
I had done exactly what I said I didn’t want to do. I had been working overtime during the pandemic (seriously, ministry during a pandemic, nothing can prepare you for that one)
I was overwhelmed with the work that “needed” to be done, people that ”needed” to be seen, and the tasks that “needed” to all be a priority.
I was over-stressed because I was putting so much pressure on myself to be there for everybody and always show up that I had “shown up” so much during that week that I wanted to literally jump in my car and leave town.
I was overbooked. It didn’t take long for the Zoom meetings to turn into catch-up coffees and for my calendar to soon become color coded in order to keep everything straight.
I was so mentally worn out that multiple times as I would talk to people I would lose my train of thought and had no ability of getting it back. It got embarrassing.
She looked at me and said: “you can’t do it. You cannot keep this up.”
She was right. It had only taken one week for me to crumble under a set of expectations that no person had put on me, but I had put on myself.
As I started this year out, I read a great book by @jeffersonbethke called “To Hell With The Hustle”.
I read it, talked about, and it and then the book ended up on the shelf with the other books I had accomplished to read in the first month of the year.
Then life got busy (yeah I see the irony of that) and I would occasionally think about it, but it didn’t fully hit me till recently.
As a worldwide pandemic forced all of us to literally stop the lives we were living, I created routines and habits that left my heart full, my mind at ease, and gave me space.
Insert reintegration since a world-wide pandemic and I am right back to who I said I didn’t want to be.
So I have spent the past week reevaluating and resetting my life and a few relationships, so I could stay sane through it all and people knew what they could expect from me.
Boundaries are not always meant to keep people out, they can be meant to keep me in.
Boundaries are for those who know their time has worth.
Or put another way..
“Time is not a replaceable asset. It cannot be bought, rolled over, transferred, or cashed in. It can only be stewarded or wasted” - Jefferson Bethke - To Hell With The Hustle
I really have the heart to talk about this topic of Sabbath Habits because as a leader and someone who has learned the hard way about the importance of setting Sabbath Habits, I want you to learn from my mistakes and we go on this journey together.
Let’s jump into this topic of Sabbath Habits and I hope and pray that maybe you will read this series and experience the same coffee shop moment of freedom that I had with my friend.
“Don’t do it. Don’t go back”.