Vacation

I was recently chatting a friend of mine over a dilemma he was facing: how do you face reverse culture shock? He is currently in the UK and seems to have found his place among the people.  Upon coming back to this  "boring" and "close-minded" nation, he has planned to find various vacation spots throughout the US to help with the transition.  I mentioned to him, "You know, the best way to vacation is to look for an adventure, not an escape."
"Ah ha!" he typed back, "You caught me!  That's exactly what I do whenever I go somewhere.  I want to escape."  I stared at the post for a long time. Adventure...not escape? I wasn't expecting that comment to emerge from my fingertips at all.  Guess I caught myself too...

As of late, I've been in deep observation of everything about myself: my lifestyle, my likes and dislikes, how I spend my days, how I spend my thoughts...   I realized that I am stuck in a very habitual pattern, and frankly, it scares me.  Here it is: I work hard to find escape.  Don't you find that interesting? I find myself year in and year out living the yuppie philosophy, "Work hard to play hard."  I find it weird that I complain 4 days of the week for having to work and always look forward to my 3 day weekend.  But then my 3 day weekend comes and goes and I always wonder where it went.

What's even more disturbing is this "vacation" I've had thus far.  I come home to "relax", or so I think.  In reality, I come home to be my alter ego...a lazy bum.  Literally, I completely lose sense of time, consideration, or interest in being active or productive. You'd think that after all the hard work and effort I put forth throughout the semester, I'd find a lot of satisfaction in this new role change.  Well, to be honest...it stinks.  Yeah, I'm dog tired, but acting like I'm tired only makes me more tired.  A week has nearly gone and I'm wondering where it's escaped to.  It's strange, the more I wanted to take a vacation from my busy mind, the more the time has taken a vacation from me.  As a lazy bum, I realize that as I try to escape from life, my life is escaping from me, and there's no way to get it back.

I talked about my passed week, and you may be wondering what happened between my last post and this one.  I was actually on an adventure.  Still on my vacation, but spending it with Jesus and 200 other Christians in the woods of New York.  Intervarsity Chapter Camp at Lake Champion.  Quite the memorable time.  It rained the entire week.  No joke.  7 hours of Bible Study with 9 other college students.  The subject? The second half of the book of Mark.  How was the experience?  Like taking a Brillo pad and scrubbing the dead skin cells off of your soul.  Quite the adventure, right?

While I think I was struck silent more that week more than I had the entire semester, I was glad for the heaviness of the subject matter.  I went to camp with the intention of 1.) finding God and 2.) finding escape.  What I found, however, is that when I found God, He held me so tight, there was no possible way I could escape.  I approached Him and let Him give me what I needed: a good dosing of veggies; an intense cleaning session; and a big hug.  He set me straight on a lot of things; the first one being "all of God and none of me".  When I prayed that prayer the first night, He radically took me on a spiritual adventure I will never forget.  He got me praying such things as "help me to lose myself, and gain You"; "make me like a kid"; and "how do I give away all my stuff?". Oddly enough, while I was very active, I felt more refreshed than I had all semester.

This whole contrast between adventure and escape makes me think about a question that's been burning in my heart for over a year...what does it mean to rest? I mean, that's what most people want to do when they vacation, right? Rest? Last summer, while I was at Chapter Camp studying the first half of Mark, I learned that the scribes, Pharisees, and religious leaders highly emphasized keeping the sabbath.  Firsthand, I know that among Jews, the sabbath is a very important weekly event.  To break the sabbath, particularly among the more religious Jews, is equal to a sin such as theft and murder. However, Jesus would constantly point out that their stance was wrong.  "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27). He later told them something that was even more radical, "So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath" (Mark 2:28).

All semester long, I'd been learning about this concept.  I led a bible study with ACF on the first half of the book of Hebrews.  Hebrews talks a lot about rest.  Particularly sabbath rest.  See, the Israelites wandered around in the desert for 40 years because they didn't trust God.  They wouldn't trust God.  They'd up and decided that He'd cheated them out of their promise that they'd reach a land flowing with milk and honey. And so they never experienced God's rest, even though they  celebrated the sabbath every week, as the law commanded (Hebrews 4:3).  Only two people of that generation trusted God, and they were the only ones of that generation to make it to the promised land. (Interesting side-note: the Israelites were not very far from me...escaping slavery, only to be enslaved in a desert...)

In the chapter before, the author of Hebrews had previously pleaded with us to be the house of God (Hebrews 3:6).  He points out in chapter 4 that to be the house of God is possible primarily because for us Jesus has become our sabbath rest.  It took me a very long time to understand this, but at Chapter Camp this year, I finally got to understand what the author meant.  After I trusted Jesus enough to ask Him to come into my heart, he started to live in me like a person lives in a house.  Jesus, Himself, always understood the idea of vacation. Adventure, not escape.  He displayed this idea particularly when He told his disciples, who had just come back from working hard at casting out demons and spreading the message of the Kingdom of God, to come with Him up in the mountains to get away for a while.  As they were trying to get away, thousands of people started to follow them for hours and the people became hungry.  They had to find food, so Jesus up and provided food for more than 5,000 people.  The disciples had to pass out bread and fish to the people and collect it all, all when they were dead tired.  Even worse yet, after the people left, they all decided to go on a boat ride and wait for Jesus to finish praying.  While they were on the boat, a storm came up and they all thought they were going to die.  All of a sudden, Jesus appears "like a ghost" walking on the water... Peter, amazed, decides to go meet Jesus.  He walks on the water a little but then starts to sink because of his unbelief.  But Jesus, acting as if walking on water were an everyday occurrence, grabs Peter, chastises him for doubting and hops into the boat.  Meanwhile, all the disciples "hearts were hardened" and found it hard to praise God for all the miracles they just saw because their idea of "vacation" was not fulfilled.  Go figure.

How did Jesus manage to remain happy-go-lucky when He of all people had a reason to complain? It was because...(drumroll please)...He made Himself a house, let God dwell in Him, and trusted in God to be the source of His rest.  He understood that when the owner of a house is rested, the house itself is rested. He didn't have to run away from His work, but instead worked under the idea that to have God in the House is to be having an eternal Sabbath.  Like Rachel was to Jacob.  He worked seven years for Laban but it only felt like a few days because of his love for her (Genesis 29:20). And Jesus is the same to us.  He is our bridegroom and when He is in the house, years of working will only feel like a few days because we are so in love.  And of all things: when I think of vacation, the best reason, to me is to be with your lover. Come to think of it, when I'm on vacation with someone I love, I wouldn't necessarily want to escape.  Life is too good for that.  Instead, I'd want to spend eternity and a day with that person, taking on the world one adventure at a time.