Hello again,

Yesterday was my first day back with the church after a restorative Sabbatical.  Here are some non-comprehensive observations from these three months:

Time goes slower out of routine.  Not sure on the physics, but my brain says it’s true.

After a week of touring Rome, Anabaptist beginnings in Switzerland feel like they happened day before yesterday.     

If you’re at the top of a ladder tearing off old siding and a wasp stings you in the mouth and you fall to the concrete, if your mouth is still the thing that hurts the most, it was a good fall.

When you go on a 50 mile bike ride with your daughter in the dead of summer and she says next year let’s do 100, it was a good ride.

Episcopalians have a good thing going with the liturgy and weekly Eucharist.

Sometimes it’s nice to not know what happened in the world that day, or week.

The rumors are true: Parks and brunch are popular on Sunday mornings.

If you always said, I’ll do that when I have the time, and then you have the time and don’t do it, maybe you just don’t want to do it.

When you go from three kids in the house a year ago to one kid in the house two weeks from now, time went fast. 

When you come back to an overflowing inbox, it might take a minute.

When you come back to a congregation overflowing with life, you’re in a good place.

Writer David Whyte gets it right again: “Withdrawal is often not what it looks like – a disappearance – no, to withdraw from entanglement can be to appear again in the world in a very real way and begin the process of renewing the primary, essential invitation again” (Consolations, p. 265).

Joel