Taking Care of Ourselves

                As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’m fifty-three years old.  That’s not old, exactly, but it’s certainly not young, either.  It’s an age at which a lot of people start to slow down a little bit. 

I’m find that’s not the case with me.  If anything, I seem to speeding up.  I find myself working harder, being more active, and doing more stuff now than I did ten or twenty years ago.

Part of that, of course, is that I started with a pretty low bar.  As my parents could tell you, when I was a kid I was not terribly active.  There were few things I loved more than having nothing to do and having all day to do it in.  Mom and Dad were constantly after me to go mow the yard, or chop musk thistles, or practice the piano, or just to get out and do something.  Playing Strat-O-Matic baseball for hours obviously did not qualify as “something”.

The main thing to which I attribute my current level of activity is that I have now found a vocation in which I enjoy almost everything I do (filling out conference reports excepted).  When you enjoy the things you do, they don’t seem like work.  They still involve effort, of course, and they take time.  That’s one of my biggest problems these days:  I never seem to have the time to do all the things I want to do, especially with three churches in three communities.

The temptation, then, is to constantly try to do more and more and more.  That’s good up to a point, but only up to a point.  One of the things I’m learning is that constant activity is really no better than constant inactivity.  While I’d love to be able to do more and more and more, I have to make sure I take care of myself, too.  If I’m not healthy in mind, body, and spirit, I’m not going to be able to help others.  That’s advice I’ve given to quite a few people over the years, but sometimes I forget to take it myself.

What that means is that, no matter how busy we get, we’ve got to take the time to do things that will keep us healthy.  We need to take time to get some exercise.  We need to take time to eat properly.  We need to take time to get enough rest.  If we don’t do those things, our bodies are going to rebel against us.  We don’t want that to happen.

                It also means that we need to take the time to let our minds wander a little bit.  I’m not saying we need to take two weeks to go meditate somewhere.  We do need to find a few minutes in our day to just let our minds go wherever they want to go, rather than just being focused on the here and now. 

When we’re constantly running here, running there, doing this, doing that, we don’t have the time to really think.  We don’t have the time to make plans that go beyond this week.  We don’t have time to think about anything but the things we have to do.  We start to get edgy and easily annoyed.  Also, we don’t have time to be creative.  We know that God is creative, and since we’re created in God’s image, that means God wants us to be creative, too.  We can’t do that if we’re engaged in constant activity with no time to think.

I hope you all enjoy what you do as much as I enjoy what I do.  No matter how much you enjoy it, though, make sure you take the time to take care of yourself.  When we do that, we are much better able to serve God and be the people God wants us to be.