Going to Florida…maybe…

I discovered long ago that I’m a naturally lazy person. If I stop for awhile, I have a hard time making myself go again. However, as long as I stay in the groove, rest doesn’t enter my mind. So, as a survival skill in college, I learned not to slow down. As long as every waking hour was full of something, I’d never have time to be lazy.
The strategy worked, and its been 10 years since I’ve taken a break. My rhythm has been non-stop. The reason we fill practically every night of every week is so that we’ll never consider what it might be like to pause. An 80-hour week has been the norm for me, and I’ve gotten so good at it, that the idea of a vacation is honestly a little bit repulsive. A friend told me recently they were thinking of a vacation, and I chided them for considering something so selfish.
However, I’m starting to concede that I might be wrong on this point. We had a series at church where our pastor talked about God’s rhythm: 6 days of hard work, and 1 day of rest. I haven’t known a day of rest in years, and I haven’t had the desire to take one. But like I said, I might have been wrong here.
I remember, literally the day before Benjamin was born, working at the church with Nicole and her busting gut right beside me. And I remember thinking anyone who did any less was dead wrong.
Well God put on the brakes in our life recently, and its certainly made me re-think a lot of things… well, almost everything actually. But one thing I’ve been toying with is this idea of rest. We had most of my vacation time booked in August for a missions trip that we didn’t end up going on, and now its half-way through September, and I have a bunch of free days that we don’t know what to do with. So we think we might try out an actual vacation.
There was a time when the idea of just sitting on a beach and doing nothing would have driven me crazy. This is not self-righteousness talking, in case it sounds that way. Its pure curiosity. I’ve always been afraid that if I tried it, I might not get back up off the beach, or that I’d miss something back home that I should have been doing. But all of a sudden, the really important stuff isn’t in my hands — probably it never was — and we honestly don’t have much else to do but try this out.
It doesn’t fit our financial goals. It doesn’t make any logical sense. It won’t help my career. It won’t benefit anyone else. And we might just enjoy doing it too much. But we’re going to try it out anyway — assuming we can pull the money together while planning for a second baby, figuring out where we’re going to live with our growing family, budgeting for the future, and negotiating our growing Canadian expenses (thanks to the US$).
So, at the end of October, we’re going to Florida — just the two of us (that is, if we can find a babysitter!) Wish us luck, or even better, help us out 😉