changes in attitude
At some moment toward the end of every sweet vacation–this time while cool, briny waters lick at my feet and the sun warms my bare shoulders; while I meander along and consider that the ocean looks both a clear, clean green in the rise of the waves and like quicksilver on the surface—I begin to pray, asking the Lord how to preserve my vacation attitude for everyday life.
It’s funny how easily I come by that kind of faith while living simply.
But what do I mean–I try to think now, as my toes sink softly into the sand–by a vacation attitude?
It isn’t really that I expect life to feel like a vacation all the time. In this season of my life, I’ve come to understand that God created rest and work alike, that they represent not competing elements but, when experienced together, the fullness of a healthy life. In the story of scripture, in the creation narrative and in the good news about Christ’s life on the earth, God demonstrates this for me himself, that there is a time for work and also a time for rest, and that He has called them both good. He promises me that He has prepared good work in advance for me and has equipped me to do it, and He promises me that He will be my rest now and forevermore.
As I amble along, I glance down at all the treasures on the beach, bits of things the ocean has tumbled into jewelry, and, discovering a thumb-sized shark’s tooth, shiny and black as night, resting right between my feet, I bend down to pick it up. I rub my thumb over its shine, thinking about the process that had to happen to make it land here, to make it look this way, thinking that there’s a transformative process happening in me, too.
No, it’s not that I’m asking God to take away my work or that I think becoming unencumbered of responsibility is the path to peace, but rather that I’m coming to see that I could extend some of my favorite vacation expectations upon a carefully curated daily life. Maybe rest could feel less like an emergency and more like a natural response.
I inhale the salty wind, drawing it in long long long and deep, and then I exhale ever-so-slowly, until everything begins again. Water slides over my toes, glistening as it spreads over the sandy shore, and then, it recedes slowly beneath another wave.
Solomon, the kingly writer of scripture’s wisdom literature, once urged, “In all your ways, know the Lord, and He will make your paths straight.”
The word Solomon used for “know,” yada, which in this verse is often translated “acknowledge,” actually refers to intimate experience. I am not merely meant to shake God’s hand and offer Him a two-fingered salute. God suffered and bled and died in obscurity and mockery, naked, save for the filthy rags of human sin and human righteousness, that I might come so close to Him as to know every curve of His Holy nature. He wants me to know how He smells, how He tastes, how He sounds, how He moves. In all your ways, I’m thinking, still fingering that shark’s tooth, still thinking of how it came even to be a tooth and wondering in what great mouth it served a life before, seemingly lost, it journeyed on and became another thing entirely. It’s a tooth, but also now not, having become a fierce tribute to the sea and her shores. People wear these on cords around their necks.
On the beach, Riley languidly tosses a frisbee into the air and it soars, arcing gracefully, even floating on the sea breeze in briefest hesitation. Adam reaches, anticipating the frisbee’s descent, but it dives sharply away from him in the last second and lands in the shallows with a splash. Riley cackles, her wild laughter loud and bold and flying toward me. On vacation, knowing–by seeing and touching and yes, by enjoying–is the primary goal to which we gladly give our time. It’s not that we aren’t active, but that every activity and every rest has that knowing as its priority.
Something echoes in my memory, a bit of the Westminster catechism, a question and response:
What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
I have begun now, as the ocean gently washes my feet, to ask myself: Can I enjoy God on ordinary days too?
In all your ways. Solomon literally means roads, uses a word, derek, that is a journeying word, because he is trying to say that many paths comprise a life, and some of them will make us whole and some of them will break us apart. So, he says, on every road–on the way to work or in the packed up car on the way to my rest, by the bright sea or in the dark valley–yada the LORD, intimately know Him, and He will even out the path, literally showing me the way. More than that, He will split the sea, even break His own body, spreading wide His arms to become the Way for me.
So, I’m thinking what I really mean, when I ask Him for a vacation attitude at home, is that He’ll keep making His home with me, that He’ll keep being my home, and that He’ll keep showing me how to live from there. I’m asking to touch Him and to be touched by Him, to know Him and feel the union He bought for me and wants for me and has with me, even while I’m washing the dishes or putting Riley’s pills into her hand one-by-one or clicking the story of it all out on a computer keyboard.
As I amble along by the sea, God’s teaching me to see, His vast healing hands pressed to my blind eyes yet another time.
I can spend so much time trying to make my own way that I forfeit the grace of enjoying Him along the Way He makes for me. This is the goal, to know Him in every kind of moment on every kind of day, whether wandering the beach or sweeping the dusty halls of home, and therein lies this attitude I would love to preserve just one more day and then another and then another still, free and blowing wild in me like the wind.
