May 4th, 2019

Can napping be considered spending time with the Lord?  Because, today I tried it out and I must say that I highly recommend it.

Whoever said the World Race was a vacation is highly confused and sorely mistaken.  Sure, some months we do tons of cool stuff and what you see back home (via the great filter of social media) is adventure days, coffee runs, and hanging out with friends.  Or, you see the stereotypical racer photos with children or doing some kind of out-of-the-ordinary, yet really cool task that we must write a blog about or post on Facebook and Instagram.  Still, we are just people, living life and doing our best to stick to the task at hand.  Our posts sometimes give an incomplete picture of the ins and outs of this 11 month journey.  Some days it’s hard to write about the mundane and we figure that we don’t even want to be living a mundane life (hence going on the World Race) so we wonder why any of you back home would want to read about it.

Well, while there’s nothing mundane about being on the World Race or building a kids camp dorm in Romania, I find my day feels very dull when I’m exhausted.  I’m just less interested in doing the doing part of living.  The days here go by fairly quickly because of my involvement with building the dorm, but today just felt long.  I felt thin, spread out like butter over too much bread (to quote the great Bilbo Baggins).  Man, I felt it today.  We’ve been going and going and, so far, I’d enjoyed the going.  But, it hit me today.

So, after lunch, our team leader announced that team time today would be spent in intentional quiet time because we’d had very little time to do anything other than work over the last few days.  I was so relieved.  I found a spot in the upstairs loft of the house to sit down.  I brought my journal and Bible, my headphones and my phone for worship music.  I sat down…. and I couldn’t pick up any of it.  For ten minutes, I tried to pray.  I asked the Lord to speak and for there to be something more to do.  Then, my eyes were heavy.  I felt kind of guilty as I nodded off.  And I felt even more guilty when I was woken up and sent back to work.  “Lord, I didn’t even spend time with you!”

Does it take doing to be with the Lord?  No.  I woke and I realized the gift it was.  His Spirit is comfort and his presence is rest.  I won’t worry about checking off the box of “spending time with God” because my day is filled with him.  I do need to be intentional, but how well the Lord knows me– he just holds me and knows my needs.  I’m working on giving myself the grace to rest in him and to not always worry about the doing and what needs to be done.

So, maybe take a nap?  I believe Jesus really loves naptime.  Don’t believe me?  Look up Matthew 8:24.  Maybe that will change your perspective.