A Summer Like No Other
How time to rest, a family trip of a lifetime, and a reading list I cannot recommend enough, changed and shaped me.
Most of my readers will know by now — through personal relationship, social media, and through the sermon I gave in September of 2020 (HERE) — that I was on my first sabbatical in June-August of last summer. It took me a while to finally sit down and gather some thoughts worth sharing about the experience. Frankly, as one of my mentors said it would, it even took the full measure of the time that I was away (three months) back in the swing of life and ministry, to even know the measure of the time that I was away, and now it has been a year.
More than cataloging what I learned — and there’s a bunch — I’ve been asking myself , beyond the stories of our adventures, what are the things worth sharing? What would be worth your time to read, and what could you take away from my experience?
Now for my pastor friends reading this, answering that question would be far easier, and more directly applicable, as I could simply speak to the merits of sabbatical, and help you answer the questions of folks in your flock, who no doubt will innocently ask the question-
“Why should the pastor get three months off? I work really hard at my job too, and I would love a three month vacation!”
While sabbatical includes vacation time in most cases, it’s is decidedly not, simply a vacation. But I digress.
What I have returned to again and again as I’ve thought about codifying my summer experience, believe it or not, is my reading list. So I want to share within this entry —
1. How I chose my reading list.
2. How I ordered and “employed” my reading list, and
3. How you might do the same for a spiritual retreat, vacation, or sabbatical yourself.
I’ll attempt to share how these books individually — and taken as a unit — impacted and shaped me, I think for the better.
The Genesis of Sabbatical
I’d been planning (hoping) for a sabbatical for a really long time. There were two parallel thoughts that very quickly became one and the same.
The first idea began in the mid-1990’s, when my roommate, Brian Umland, and I went on two road trips around the United States, mostly to see friends and family. I knew then, that someday I would have a family, and I would rent an RV and take them west. Brian and I never saw the national parks, or much of the west, and so that dream was tucked away for another day.
The second thought was the idea of a sabbatical. I began serving in youth ministry in 1994 and worked for amazing leaders before becoming one myself. My dream job became reality when I was hired as the Youth Pastor at Groton Bible Chapel in 2005. After 12 years of volunteer ministry, that was in many ways more formative, critical, and impactful than my time as a full-time youth pastor, I had an incredible run of over a decade of full time youth ministry in the lives of teenagers and their families, before it became clear that God had called me to be the Lead Pastor at GBC.
Truly, there was grief mingled with joy in the acknowledgment of this necessary change. In many ways, the 22 years of intense ministry with teens will never be matched in the role as a Lead Pastor, and I wouldn’t trade a moment.
But as one chapter was closing and another opening, I began to desire a break, having been in ministry for as long as I had. I of course knew of the concept of sabbatical, although it was foreign to the culture of our church.
The first time I mentioned it as an idea to my boss was 2013. It was not flatly rejected, but clearly was something that was not even on the horizon.
In time, as mentioned earlier, the idea of an epic family road trip and a sabbatical relief from ministry merged into one, and I formally presented my request to the GBC elders in 2018. Praise the Lord, they were very receptive to the idea.
There were a lot of fluid things at our church in the 2017–2019 years. Getting through the church’s first ever capital campaign, and our building project, were of course priorities, and the other side of these major undertakings, seemed a natural time for such a break.
Pretty much from the moment we identified a timeline, I began thinking about how I would spend my time. I took absolutely seriously the restorative nature of sabbatical. Namely, that sabbatical was also an investment by the church in it’s pastor’s mental health and spiritual formation, not to mention physical rest, and so I wanted to think strategically about each segment of the journey.
So there were times dedicated to marriage health, exclusive times of both adventure and conversation with my four children, and time for projects, exercise, and rest (naps!) for myself personally.
Reading List
I knew that for mental health and spiritual formation, in addition to reading God’s Word, and journaling each day, I wanted to maximize a summer reading list.
I was looking for three things.
- I set a goal of five books, no more.
- The list needed to incorporate books of a devotional and contemplative nature, as well as doctrinal and theological, and finally practical and applicable.
- I needed the “stack” to be portable, along with a journal, enough to be actually usable on the plane, in the RV, in all kinds of situations and times of day, etc.
So I settled on the following five books. I’ll speak a bit about each one, and why I think this is such a fine list for sabbatical, as well as why I’d recommend them individually as well.
- Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund
- Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer
- What’s So Amazing About Grace by Phillip Yancey
- A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23 by W. Philip Keller
- Emotionally Health Leader by Peter Scazzero
What is of course missing, that I would add or exchange depending on the purpose of my time away, are at least a couple of categories.
1. I left out biography (which I love). Simply because I had read a number of biographical works over the last year or two.
2. Apologetics, which felt too, “academic” and like work for sabbatical.
But if I had it to do over I might have added one more of simply a mindless work of fiction. Reading for the purpose of purely entertainment has forever been a challenge for me, although I accept that it is necessary as well.
As I said, I began creating this list about eighteen months before the sabbatical. The list was never more than seven books and never less than three. Some titles came on and then left for good, others came on of and on again, but this was the final version.
In order to meet my third objective of potability, I polled several pastor friends, and while the overwhelming majority encouraged paper books and a pen and paper journal, I ended up purchasing all of my books from Amazon for Kindle on my iPad, and purchasing the Day One Premium journaling app as well. This moved my entire “operation” digital, and proved to be absolutely the right move, allowing for easy highlighting, copying and pasting, and so forth, throughout my summer.
Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund
Gentle and Lowly, was and is, the center piece of this list, my sabbatical, and of all of 2020. I received this little, mostly devotional volume, basically by complete “coincidence” in a shipment of other books. I did not order it, or at least I do not remember doing so. (Promotional agreement with Crossway, I suspect).
I read Gentle and Lowly in the early months of the pandemic, and was blown away by its simplicity, rock solid doctrine, and the fresh wind of Grace in Christ that blew through my life as I read its pages. After completing it in late April, it became the final add to my reading list, and I actually read it twice — once in June and once in August — while on sabbatical.
Since then, I have given copies to our entire staff at GBC (and we worked our way through it as a team), our elder team, a group of my pastoral peers, our finance team, and several individuals.
While Gentle and Lowly will not blow away the seasoned believer with never-before-thought-of Biblical nuggets or information, what it does do is recast’s the Gospel, through the words of the puritans, and its author, Dane Ortlund himself, in a way that is “other”, fresh and that brings together both doctrine and devotion in a profoundly refreshing manner.
A few key passages in this little volume that landed with particular weight are:
“Consider the words of Exodus 34: 6–7. “Merciful and gracious.” These are the first words out of God’s own mouth after proclaiming his name (“ the Lord,” or “I am”). The first words. The only two words Jesus will use to describe his own heart are gentle and lowly (Matt. 11: 29). And the first two words God uses to describe who he is are merciful and gracious. God does not reveal his glory as, “The Lord, the Lord, exacting and precise,” or, “The Lord, the Lord, tolerant and overlooking,” or, “The Lord, the Lord, disappointed and frustrated.” His highest priority and deepest delight and first reaction — his heart — is merciful and gracious. He gently accommodates himself to our terms rather than overwhelming us with his.
…
It takes much accumulated provoking to draw out his ire. Unlike us, who are often emotional dams ready to break, God can put up with a lot. This is why the Old Testament speaks of God being “provoked to anger” by his people dozens of times (especially in Deuteronomy; 1–2 Kings; and Jeremiah). But not once are we told that God is “provoked to love” or “provoked to mercy.” His anger requires provocation; his mercy is pent up, ready to gush forth. We tend to think: divine anger is pent up, spring-loaded; divine mercy is slow to build. It’s just the opposite. Divine mercy is ready to burst forth at the slightest prick. 2 (For fallen humans, we learn in the New Testament, this is reversed. We are to provoke one another to love, according to Hebrews 10: 24. Yahweh needs no provoking to love, only to anger. We need no provoking to anger, only to love. Once again, the Bible is one long attempt to deconstruct our natural vision of who God actually is.)
…
The Christian life, from one angle, is the long journey of letting our natural assumption about who God is, over many decades, fall away, being slowly replaced with God’s own insistence on who he is. This is hard work. It takes a lot of sermons and a lot of suffering to believe that God’s deepest heart is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger.” The fall in Genesis 3 not only sent us into condemnation and exile. The fall also entrenched in our minds dark thoughts of God, thoughts that are only dug out over multiple exposures to the gospel over many years. Perhaps Satan’s greatest victory in your life today is not the sin in which you regularly indulge but the dark thoughts of God’s heart that cause you to go there in the first place and keep you cool toward him in the wake of it.
…
Out of his heart flows mercy; out of ours, reluctance to receive it. We are the cool and calculating ones, not he. He is open-armed. We stiff-arm. Our naturally decaffeinated views of God’s heart might feel right because we’re being stern with ourselves, not letting ourselves off the hook too easily. Such sternness feels appropriately morally serious. But this deflecting of God’s yearning heart does not reflect Scripture’s testimony about how God feels toward his own. God is of course morally serious, far more than we are. But the Bible takes us by the hand and leads us out from under the feeling that his heart for us wavers according to our loveliness. God’s heart confounds our intuitions of who he is.”
I cannot recommend this little book enough.
Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer
Tozer, the CMA (Christian Missionary Alliance) Pastor in Chicago and Onterio, Canada wrote most of his works in the 50’s and 60’s. He expressed great concern about the church’s decline toward moral and doctrinal compromise, and so his two most known works- The Pursuit of God, and the aforementioned, Knowledge of the Holy, greatly concern themselves with Christian holiness and fidelity of doctrine. He writes:
“If God rules His universe by His sovereign decrees, how is it possible for man to exercise free choice?
The attempt to answer these questions has divided the Christian church neatly into two camps which have borne the names of two distinguished theologians, Jacobus Arminius and John Calvin. Most Christians are content to get into one camp or the other and deny either sovereignty to God or free will to man. It appears possible, however, to reconcile these two positions without doing violence to either…
“God sovereignly decreed that man should be free to exercise moral choice, and man from the beginning has fulfilled that decree by making his choice between good and evil. When he chooses to do evil, he does not thereby countervail the sovereign will of God but fulfills it, inasmuch as the eternal decree decided not which choice the man should make but that he should be free to make it. If in His absolute freedom God has willed to give man limited freedom, who is there to stay His hand or say, “What does thou?” Man’s will is free because God is sovereign. A God less than sovereign could not bestow moral freedom upon His creatures. He would be afraid to do so.”
…
“The love of God is one of the great realities of the universe, a pillar upon which the hope of the world rests. But it is a personal, intimate thing, too. God does not love populations, He loves people.”
Naturally then, Knowledge of the Holy was my “theology booster”, as it is a treatise on the attributes of God. This also played so well along side of Gentle and Lowly. I read the two of these nearly daily, beginning on the 15th June.
What’s So Amazing about Grace by Philip Yancey
In that first month off, half of which I was home, and the other half of which we were on the road out west, I also sprinkled in reading What’s So Amazing About Grace by Phillip Yancey. This book was hugely impactful on me in the formative years of early ministry in my twenties. For those who don’t know, Phillip Yancey was the Tim Keller of the 90’s. His books were immensely popular in the evangelical world and I devoured them as they came out.
Yancey’s most important contribution to the church, for much of those growing up as evangelicals in the 50's-80's, was bringing an understanding of grace to a Church that had been generationally about law. In my own life, Yancey’s writing was the Gospel I understood academically, but had not seen in real life, as the church and much of family life was driven by Christian performance, rather than a clear understanding of grace in action.
In other words, evangelicals in the world of my childhood “did” grace really well where justification was concerned, welcoming the penitent sinner home to the salvation offered in Jesus, but sanctification was another matter. Christian living became very much about ones performance, and sin, when discovered brought harsh punishment and gobs of shame.
The “acceptable exceptions” (see Jerry Bridges’ Respectable Sins as a bonus read) were of course spiritual pride — particularly the brand associated with proprietary doctrine — and gluttony — which seemed to be sought and rewarded, rather than avoided and chastened — like the sins of alcohol or swearing.
To this world, my mid-twenties self drank Yancey’s words like a refreshing spring, and the Lord used them to deal with my own sin, as well as to shape the kind of minister I would become years later — one delighted to dispense the Grace of Jesus to the erring brother and sister, like a man placing a carefully thought, and beautifully wrapped gift in the hands of a desperate recipient.
Yeah, Yancey’s book was part nostalgia, no doubt. But it was the best kind of nostalgia. The kind that recites the history of God’s redemptive work in our lives, much like Palm 122 and others in the Psalter. A recital that sets us back on our feet, under grace.
Take this passage as a for instance of Yancey’s inspirational style of writing:
“Not long ago I received in the mail a postcard from a friend that had on it only six words, “I am the one Jesus loves.” I smiled when I saw the return address, for my strange friend excels at these pious slogans. When I called him, though, he told me the slogan came from the author and speaker Brennan Manning. At a seminar, Manning referred to Jesus’ closest friend on earth, the disciple named John, identified in the Gospels as “the one Jesus loved.” Manning said, “If John were to be asked, ‘What is your primary identity in life?’ he would not reply, ‘I am a disciple, an apostle, an evangelist, an author of one of the four Gospels,’ but rather, ‘I am the one Jesus loves.’” What would it mean, I ask myself, if I too came to the place where I saw my primary identity in life as “the one Jesus loves”? How differently would I view myself at the end of a day?”
Practically speaking, Yancey’s words dovetailed so perfectly with the doctrine of Tozer and the fresh devotional medications of Ortlund.
Roughly around the first of August I’d completed these first three books and began with two new ones.
A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23 by W. Philip Keller
This little volume written decades ago, and given to me first by my grandmother, Mabel — again in my twenties — is written by Keller (no relation to Tim Keller of NYC) a Canadian-born man, who was raised a missionary kid in Africa, and other parts of the world, where he was a shepherd many times over in the younger half of his life.
Keller does an amazing job bringing Psalm 23, and the rest of the Scriptures use of the shepherd/sheep picture to life with greater vibrancy, through his in-depth understanding of the nature of sheep and shepherding personally. As a for instance:
“He Makes Me Lie Down in Green Pastures”
“In the course of time I came to realize that nothing so quieted and reassured the sheep as to see me in the field. The presence of their master and owner and protector put them at ease as nothing else could do, and this applied day and night. There was one summer when sheep rustling was a common occurrence in our district. Night after night the dog and I were out under the stars, keeping watch over the flock by night, ready to defend them from the raids of any rustlers. The news of my diligence spread along the grapevine of our back country roads, and the rustlers quickly decided to leave us alone and try their tactics elsewhere. “He makes me lie down.” In the Christian’s life there is no substitute for the keen awareness that our Shepherd is nearby. There is nothing like Christ’s presence to dispel the fear, the panic, the terror of the unknown.
…the knowledge that my Master, my Friend, my Owner has things under control even when they may appear calamitous. This gives me great consolation, repose, and rest. I find comfort in saying, “Now I lay me down in peace and sleep, for Thou, God, keepest me.”
…
It is the special office work of God’s gracious Spirit to convey this sense of the Christ to our fearful hearts. He comes quietly to reassure us that Christ Himself is aware of our dilemma and deeply involved in it with us.
…
In every animal society there is established an order of dominance or status within the group. In a penful of chickens it is referred to as the “pecking order.” With cattle it is called the “horning order.” Among sheep we speak of the “butting order.”
…one point that always interested me very much was that whenever I came into view and my presence attracted their attention, the sheep quickly forgot their foolish rivalries and stopped their fighting. The shepherd’s presence made all the difference in their behavior.
…
It is the humble heart walking quietly and contentedly in the close and intimate companionship of Christ that is at rest, that can relax, simply glad to lie down and let the world go by. When my eyes are on my Master, they are not on those around me. This is the place of peace.”
Profound words that could only be authored by someone who’d known the life of a shepherd persaonlly. These words spoke life to my soul!
Emotionally Healthy Leader by Peter Scazzero
Finally, nearing the end of my time away, and preparing to return to “normal life”, I reread Pete Scozarro’s Emotionally Healthy Leader. (I’d recommend Emotionally Healthy Spirituality first, especially to folks who are not pastor’s).
Peter Scazzero has built a ministry around the idea of understanding and growing from the effects of generational sin and family of origin issues coupled with practical teaching about ancient rhythms of “solitude and silence” and the biblical concept of “Sabbath” (Sabbatical).
“The emotionally unhealthy leader is someone who operates in a continuous state of emotional and spiritual deficit, lacking emotional maturity and a “being with God” sufficient to sustain their “doing for God.””
• Unhealthy leaders lack, for example, awareness of their feelings, their weaknesses and limits, how their past impacts their present, and how others experience them. They also lack the capacity and skill to enter deeply into the feelings and perspectives of others.
• Unhealthy leaders engage in more activities than their combined spiritual, physical, and emotional reserves can sustain. They give out for God more than they receive from him. They serve others in order to share the joy of Christ, but that joy remains elusive to themselves.
When we devote ourselves to reaching the world for Christ while ignoring our own emotional and spiritual health, our leadership is shortsighted at best.
At worst, we are negligent, needlessly hurting others and undermining God’s desire to expand his kingdom through us. Leadership is hard. It involves suffering. But there is a big difference between suffering for the gospel as Paul describes (2 Timothy 2: 8) and needless suffering that is a result of our unwillingness to honestly engage difficult and challenging leadership tasks.
…four characteristics: low self-awareness, prioritizing ministry over marriage/singleness, doing too much for God, and failing to practice a Sabbath rhythm.
…
Yet the first and most difficult task we face as leaders is to lead ourselves.
Everything in us cries out against it. That is why we externalize everything — it is far easier to deal with the exterior world. It is easier to spend your life manipulating an institution than dealing with your own soul. We make institutions sound complicated and hard and rigorous, but they are simplicity itself compared with our inner labyrinths.”
Emotionally Healthy Leader is uber practical and less introspective than its predecessor, EHS (above) and this was the perfect match for the end of my time away, allowing me to categorically ask the larger questions-
1. What have I learned?
2. What am I going to change, to do differently, returning to ministry?
Return and Recommendation
I returned to “normal” life (mid-pandemic still, mind you) and largely felt 1. Equipped, 2. Refreshed, 3. Rested, 4. Reassured, and 5. At Peace.
While this was of course, not only due to what I’d read, studied, and journaled about, but also about the rest, fun, and break from responsibility, not to mention all the quality family time I’d experienced, nonetheless this reading list played a profound role in how I came back.
In short, I came back with a sense of the biblical word, “Shalom”- which means “wholeness”, or peace of the whole person- body, soul, and spirit.
I am forever grateful for these author’s who came on this journey with me and helped to shape me for this next season of ministry, and I recommend them to you as well, especially if you find yourself needing to be refreshed and re-equipped today.
