Take a break? ...

Thursday, Feb 20, 2014. Many of us have a dense working schedule today. When you are part of an international competition, it is difficult to go slow pace. Either you are active and competitive, or you are dead.

Proper breaks …

How does it work to get the proper breaks? How to put proper time-outs into your days? Sometimes that is difficult just because of the structure of your work environment. Sometimes it is a mental challenge, since your mind does not want to stop or calm down just because you have ten minuts for yourself.

The bible gives us the Sunday to take a break. The Sunday is a fantastic idea. It is a fantastic day, indeed. But also: if you take responsibility in some Christian church, you might have full and active Sundays. If you take part in the music group, or if you lead the worship service, or if you preach, if you teach, if you lead some group on Sunday evenings … in all these cases the Sunday does not operate as Sunday any more. It becomes a kind of working day and you need to find another day to step out of your activity and out of your routine!

I had an intense discussion recently about what causes our time to be so busy. We fond globalization to play an important part of it. When you are always global with all you do, you cannot just ignore the competition, even if it is far away. You cannot just solve some problem your way, when there are dozen of other and possibly better solutions. You have to compare, you need to compete. Having a global view, even without further ingredients of the game, changes a lot in the way we do things!

All is built on grace! …

What we do not see when we are in activity and competition is that all what we can reach in our life is built on grace!

It starts with our immediate personal environment, with our parents, with brothers and sisters, with friends. All this is grace. We cannot generate it. We can destroy a part of it by nasty behaviour. But it is difficult to generate with our own powers. God gives us people who love us, people who are interested in us. And he gives us love for ourselves, he gives us the ability to have interest in others. All this is grace at its core!

So stepping out of activity and competition is a crucial step to get back to the source of life, the source of love and relationships. We need the Sunday, a real Sunday. We need the breaks, to get back to the origin of life - and then, with a sound basis, return to our activities and balance our decisions. At that point, when we come with a renewed attitude, we will realize how deep HIS grace also penetrates our activities and competition. We will realize that all we can reach here is his grace as well. And in his grace, he will give us both the success and failures which his wisdom permits. (Roland Potthast) ... more texts