Ep. 074 - How Should Christians Vacation? Reclaiming Rest with Purpose

Episode Transcript

Austin
In the beginning, God established a pattern of work and rest that we follow in our lives. What does it mean, then, to take a vacation how God intends? Today we will be discussing what it looks like to steward our vacations as the gifts of God that they are.

Spencer
Austin. Today we get to talk about vacations, and this is an interesting topic, especially for us, because we think about being stewards of everything that the Lord has given us. So finances, obviously one of the key things on our podcast, but also our time and our energy, and that really relates to vacations, both of those along with relationships.
You know, how do we think about relationships in regard to this time that we've set aside for vacation? So can you start to unpack things and help us dive into the topic?

Austin
Yeah, I think at a big picture, we're going to start off and just say vacations are a good gift from God. He created the world. He instituted rest after he created the world. I think the reality that we oftentimes stop there and say, well, okay, if we read Genesis one and two, God created the world and then God rested.
So therefore rest is good. We should just long and seek for rest, without continuing and being reminded that while God, yes, stops at His initial creation, He doesn't stop working because He continually is upholding the universe by the Word of His power, We read in Hebrews 1:3 that we'll get back to later. He is constantly maintaining the universe, so He’s still working in some way.
It's just different than His creative work that He did in the creation of the universe. And so we need to both set and forth that work is good and rest is good. And so as we think about vacations, they are a beautiful gift from God. Jesus continued to institute this after He would go and serve people. He would oftentimes then go to the mountain and pray and spend time alone with the Father.
And how many times do we see Jesus getting in a boat and there's a storm around because He is resting from the work He is done? He has a posture of moving from work to rest, to work to rest. And so I think we need to contrast that with this idea of our leisure culture in this almost idolization of vacation in the West.
And I think both can be good. We look at the entirety of Scripture, we look at the entirety of the created universe, and we say work is good. Rest is good, and idolization of work is bad. And an idolization of rest is bad, and an idolization of leisure is bad. And I think Paul Kingsnorth, he had a 2024 Erasmus lecture that he gave, and at one point, kind of in the middle where he's talking about Christian civilization.
And when we look at that as the telos, like the building of a civilization, is the end of Christendom. That's what he's speaking against here. But he says, talking about the ancient seven deadly sins. Even sloth has been monetized. How else could something as oxymoronic as leisure industry even exist. And I think Kingsnorth here is really hitting on a nerve for us in the West.
We look to our lives and say, I'm going to work hard so that I can take a week at the beach, a month in Hawaii. I'll take my kids to Europe every summer. It's the telos. It's become our aim. You know, when anything becomes our telos, our aim, rather than the kingdom of God, as Kierkegaard would say, it becomes an idol.
And we need to start seeing it as that. And so whether it's a vacation or whether it is work, we need to come back and say, okay, what does God say about each of these things? And how do we then steward them well?

Spencer
So we think about really one of the things that you said being work and rest, vacation is really neither in some ways in the West. Because we think about rest and we look at how Jesus did rest and it was solitude. It was away from people. And not that you have to always be away from people to have rest or solitude.
Obviously solitude, you need to be away from people. But, we often equate, I think, this rest with vacation, but we ought not to, because oftentimes we need a vacation from our vacation when we get back because we're so tired. We've pursued leisure. We've pursued this, this fun or this activity in some way that is very different than rest and particularly spiritual rest, because we could even look at this as a level of physical rest that maybe we just need a slower pace, maybe we need a, some time at home or a time in the mountains or wherever it might be,
just a lot more sleep, you know, and less intense work schedule or something like that. But the spiritual rest, you know, oftentimes we have no place for that in the solitude that we see in Jesus's life.

Austin
Right, absolutely. And I think that's where we come back to and say, what place does a vacation have? What is a vacation? What is it intended to be? And how do we really it doesn't have to be okay. I'm going to take my kids to the mountains and we're not going to talk for five days. Like we often joke between us,
like when our kids were little and they're still young, but when they were really little under five vacations became a trip where I'm doing the same work that I was doing at home, away from home.

Spencer
it’s you take all your same issues to a place that you're not familiar with, and you get less sleep and good luck.

Austin
Yeah. Was it fun? Yeah, it absolutely was fun. But I come back and I can't tell you how many times that I've been on a trip or a vacation where I'm like, I need a five day vacation from that where I just don't do anything. And so I think we just we need to reorient and say, what spaces do each of these play in our lives?
Again, God allows us to celebrate, to do these things. But at what pace? At what rhythm? What is our focus? What is our telos and the aim here when we take a vacation?

Spencer
Because there's really not a level of rejuvenation, you know, we think about, okay, if you're the average, you know, American or whatever, and maybe you have, 3 or 4 weeks of vacation from your job every year. Maybe you have more, maybe, you know, for whatever reason, your work, you have more or you have less. You know, there are folks that only get two weeks, a year.
But regardless, you have a finite amount of time away from your job. And so often that is wholly focused on some activity or some trip or something that it's difficult to see how it spiritually rejuvenates us. I heard a pastor one time even saying that he felt like he needed to serve his family so well on the vacation and lay down his life so much that it just wasn't going to be recharging.
And my question was always, okay, that's fine. You know, if you feel called to that. But when are you going to, you know, carve out time for your spiritual batteries to be recharged? So there has to be that level of balance, I think that we recognize we're going to get run down if we don't have times like Jesus, where He withdraws for extended periods of solitude.
This is more than, you know, 15 minutes or 30 minutes or even an hour, you know, in the morning when we maybe able to connect with the Lord. That's great. Those are important times. But having a more extended time where we can sit at the feet of the Lord, listen, rest, those are critical as well.

Austin
Absolutely. So let's come back and look at both Genesis 2, Hebrews 1, and kind of look at the pace of how God moved in between His work, His rest, and how those things changed. And then take then a step to say, okay, how do we actually take vacations from either just being purely leisure activities that may just be exhausting trips to how do they become purposeful?
How do they become meaningful? So Genesis 2:1-3 says, thus the heavens and earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished His work that He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work that
He had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that He had done in creation.
So obviously we see here God has expended extraordinary energy creating the heavens and the earth. He formed it. It was without form and void. He brought to bear life that was humans, plants, animals. It was an incredible amount of work that he did just in this earth, but also in the greater universe. God put forth a ton of effort.
And then he rested from that creative work. On the seventh day he rested. But he doesn't stop there, because again, we look at Hebrews 1:3 and it tells us that God created the world through Jesus. And Jesus upholds the universe by the word of his power. And so we don't see a stop, a complete cessation of work.
God is continuing his upholding power. And so God creates the world, He completes his creative work, and then he moves to a maintenance posture. If any of you own a home, you know that after it's built, it doesn't just cease. You need to continue painting, doing Hvac repairs, doing other type of maintenance work. It's the same with the cosmos and the creation.
God creates it and then he maintains it. He continues to be an active participant in the world. He is at rest, but he is still working. And so I think as we look towards our vacations, how do we model it in such a way that a vacation is a cessation from one type of work, and maybe it's a picking up of another type, but is that type of work going to bring rest to my soul?
Like you were saying, if I just go into a time of solitude, maybe it's a time of extended fasting and prayer. That's a different type of work, but it may give a longer spiritual rest to my body. It may rejuvenate in ways that are different than that initial work of my 9 to 5 job.

Spencer
Well, and it's a work, you know, if we think about that in a classic sense versus a different activity, you know, really. So it's we might not label that other activity work. Just to, to keep things separate there. But it is an activity. It's, it's an active engagement there, which I think sometimes gets lost on us because we say, oh, I'm getting so tired with this work.
So I need to do something over here on this side of things that is different, because the work that I do is draining me.

Austin
Right, right. Well, and I think back for our time in Denver, it was, Denver is such a leisure focused city. The constant question that you're asked when you live there and there are, I mean, it's a very active city as well, but it's okay, What 14 are you going to climb? What ski mountain are you going to? Where's the next rock climbing?
Where's the next whitewater? Like, what is the adventure. You are working so that you can have the next adventure. And so the work was always so that you could play. And I think play is good. And I think we come back to this and say if we're going to take vacations, we can stop paid work and enter into a different type of work.
But there needs to be a place of contentment in my soul, a place of longing in my soul that it's not just I'm just seeking the next adventure. We can play with God, but our life shouldn't be centered on. Okay, it goes from this to that, to this, to that. And I'm just kind of pushing God to the outside.

Spencer
And it seems like one of those diagnostic questions that we can ask ourselves is, am I really just exhausted at the end of the day when I take vacations, you know? And if we are, then maybe the next question is, is that healthy? Is that spiritually healthy over time? Because you may make that choice and you may say, okay, we're going to Europe.
We've never been to Europe. We're going to pack as much as we can into seven days, ten days, whatever it might be. And you might say, okay, I'm this is this is not really this is not a vacation from a standpoint of rest. It's going to be engagement. And we're going to learn a ton. And this is what it is.
But so much of our time doesn't need to be that, when we think about what a vacation is or just time off of work. We really need to be intentional with that, which I think is what we're getting back to. You know, so often it's really saying, okay, if I'm going to the beach, for instance, we were, you know, with friends over spring break, and I just noticed we had a couple of days where at the end of the day, we were all together, two families, we were all together and, we were singing songs.
We were talking about the day we were having a good time in community, but there was a level of rest. There was kind of a bookend for the day. We weren't trying to cram in one more activity. We weren't trying to get up early the next morning so that we could get out and fish at 5 a.m. or whatever it is,
you know, for some of the folks that were headed out early, there's there was just it was a complete day, but it felt so restful because we were all connected at the end. And we were also connected to the Lord.

Austin
Yeah. And I think that's where we come back to with any sort of vacation we take, any time we create spaces, whether it is in a work day, whether it is in a vacation day. Are we creating those spaces where our aim and our focus is man, God, you have given me a time to be away from my normal rhythms.
I can take a little bit more space in quiet and solitude and prayer and worship and celebration. If I am just looking at like, okay, what's the next activity, what's the next activity, that's where it becomes really draining. And, it goes from my aim is about enjoying this life with God to it’s I'm enjoying my life that I get to create, and I think that's the distance that we often see between a leisure culture and a purposeful telos of I want to enjoy the Kingdom of God, this creation of God, the people of God with God.
And I think that's where we start shifting and saying, okay, as we look at our vacations, are we nailing down the itinerary where it's at 9:05, breakfast happens at 9:10. We get to the theme park at 9:15. We're riding this ride. It's like if I'm trying to do that, I am going to be totally exhausted. There may be a place for it, but again, where is that
telos? Where is that aim? Is that aim towards my fulfillment and my desire and my delight? Our civilization would say yes, do that. I think the telos of the kingdom of God is, am I participating with the Lord in this? Is my aim to enjoy him, to enjoy his people, to enjoy his creation? Am I able to take a worshipful posture in this?
And then we can say, okay, whether it's a beach vacation, a mountain vacation, a trip to Europe, a missions trip, because I think even sometimes on missions trips that I've later taken, I have left and I'm like, I am wiped out, just totally exhausted. I may have done a couple days of really good, soul filling work, and then some days I'm like, I'm just fried.
And how do I, how do I, make sure that that's still within the aim of that plate, that different type of vacation? Because a mission trip can be a vacation that can be draining.

Spencer
Yeah. Well, and sometimes we're called onto those trips and that just needs to be part of what we expect is it's going to be intense. It's going to be, draining. You know, in some ways by the time that we get back. But that's the Lord's call on our lives. And that's even part of maybe our work.
But when we think about rest, you know, and the work rest balance, it's almost like we need that as a posture rather than the work vacation balance that our culture talks about. Because if we say work/rest, it's much easier to say, okay, rest over here. On this side of things, I have almost zero in this column.
I don't take any time to get away from other people. I don't take any time to get away to fast and pray. I don't take any time to recharge my spiritual batteries. So if we, if we put that ledger together, sometimes it's easier for us to kind of diagnose, like, okay, where is my balance? Oh, well, I've taken in,
my vacations are all over here on the side of intense activity. They could almost be categorized as work. And particularly for those of us who maybe gravitate in our lives in some ways towards a slower pace in, in rest, good grief. You know, we're over here and we just move from high activity one area to high activity another area.
And that's a recipe for, you know, being spiritually run down.

Austin
Absolutely. And so I think just as we close this out and I think as we kind of wrap this up, it is vacations are a good gift from God. They have, they always have a place if we aim them correctly. And I think coming back to that point, I like the idea of this isn't work/vacation. It may be work to work, but where are we finding space to,
to slow down, to connect with God as we're dreaming about these vacations that maybe three, six, nine months away? Are we not just looking at man, this is going to be an awesome activity. This is going to be an awesome activity. Or are we looking to say, where am I building in space where I can really take time with the Lord here, as we're talking with friends and family members as we're planning these things, hey, are we creating space where we can rest with the Lord together?

Spencer
Well, and even in our work lives. You know, there are so many of us who, even if we wouldn't necessarily admit it upfront, when we look at our posture, we would say the vacation almost becomes an idol, and I'm living in my work days until I can get to my vacation days. And that's not a good posture either, because we're really not participating with God amidst the work.
We're longing for a different time, a different season. We're not, we're not being present in the moment, participating with the Lord. Instead, we're looking and we're saying, oh, it's going to be so nice to be on the beach or to be, you know, on that trip or whatever it might be. That's where I'm going to find my fulfillment.
And the Lord says, no, every day you walk with me, we find fulfillment through that. And whether you're doing work in this area or whether you are, having a time of rest or you have a different level of activity, each one of those gives us an opportunity to walk alongside Jesus.

Austin
Absolutely. Well, Spencer, thanks for having this conversation about work and rest and vacation and play and enjoyment and delight in the Lord. Folks, if y'all had any questions, feel free to leave them down below. Clients, we would love to talk with you about. How do you steward your vacations well. Until next time, we look forward to seeing you again.
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Disclosure
This content was provided by Second Half Stewardship. We are in Knoxville, Tennessee and you can visit our website at www.secondhalfstewardship.com. The information in this recording is intended for general, educational and informational purposes only, and should not be construed as investment advisory, financial planning, legal, tax or other professional advice based on your specific situation. Please consult your professional advisor before taking any action based on its contents.