GOAL: RESERVOIR LIVING for a LIFETIME of FLOURISHING
{Notes on Emotionally Healthy Leadership podcast.}
Daily Rhythms: thrice daily pauses to contemplate on God and experience His presence, serving to replenish your soul throughout each day.
Sabbath: a weekly 24 hour period in which our thoughts dwell on God and His ways, refreshing our souls and filling our emotional reservoirs. Stop, rest, and delight yourself in the LORD. The Sabbath is a GIFT to you. It breaks the addiction of producing and perfectionism and battles the powers and principalities that fight to break us.
Sabbatical: 2-4 month period every 7-8 years; a longer time to stop, rest, contemplate and to refresh the soul.
Vacations: a mini-sabbatical (2-4 weeks in a row) that are not meant to carry the full weight of your refreshment. If you are not taking a weekly Sabbath or regular Sabbaticals, then vacations will not suffice to refresh you.
Compensation Times: shorter times of to rest and recover before we head right back into the fray. These help in heavy work seasons.
Day Alone with God: a monthly time of refreshment to fill yourself to overflowing.
VACATIONS
Before Vacation:
Take steps to disconnect from your work and social media. Communicate with the appropriate people. Set up away messages. Firm up your boundaries against any producing or work. Plan for activities that will bring you delight, joy.
During Vacation:
1. STOP. EVERYTHING. No 'producing'. Just rest in being utterly loved. Give yourself permission to be FREE from 'finishing' the undone. Trust God to take care of everything while you are not working.
2. REST. Rest the soil of your soul. Realize you are not God and let go of it all. Rest from paid and unpaid work, from any sort of producing. Release 'accomplishment' and embrace that Jesus loves you without your doing anything. Forego any 'multi-tasking'. Make no big decisions. No "have to's" or "should's." Learn to rest in what God has done for you so that you do not have to earn His relationship with you.
3. DELIGHT. Structure time to delight in the miracle of life, in God and His blessings. Cultivating 'aha' moments. Move only in what brings JOY. (God is a playful being.)
4. CONTEMPLATE. See the Invisible God in the visible all around me. The sacremental nature of life. Taste our eternal Sabbath rest.
Returning to Life from Vacation:
For 1-2 days, take the day to be alone with Jesus before returning to work.
Try to process whatever God showed you on your time off.
Receiving these rhythmic gifts of rest result in a life of flourishing.
