A few years ago I started using the full focus planner to organize my life. (It is a helpful tool and it might also be a productivity cult, www.fullfocusplanner.com, you decide…). The planner helps me focus on goals for the quarter, projects for the week, and tasks for the day. As you might imagine, the idea is to have these things connected so that what I focus on each day moves me closer to my project for the week and each week moves me closer to my three month goals. I have to say, I love the simple elegance of the system. It limits me to three goals… because really, that is all any person can manage. I may imagine that with the right tools, better skill, and more practice I can do more than three goals… but really, I only have deep focus when I limit myself to three.
Setting the right limitations helps me frame up the three month window of time and focus on what’s most meaningful and important, instead of scrambling to cover all the extra stuff that gets piled on top. Often, I struggle because I want to have more than three goals. Or I discover new goals developing in the midst of my quarter and I say “yes” to them prematurely. Or I am not specific enough about what is my goal to accomplish in a vision I have for the whole church community. I can see the whole picture, where I want the church to be in 3 months, but I miss the clarity to break it down into separate parts. Anyway, I’m learning by doing. It gets better each quarter as I try to focus on what is important and meaningful and try to let go of the other competing important responsibilities in my life that stress me out and causes me to clench my teeth and hold my breath.
It just so happens that my Sabbatical time coincides with the start of Quarter III. I have a brand new shiny red planner for these three months of sabbath rest. I was delighted to discover the symmetry between my planner system and my Sabbatical. I can craft Q3 as a Sabbath Planner! I can focus on the gifts of this sabbatical time and the planner will be a helpful journal of my season of rest! And besides, I love starting a new planner with fresh pages and fresh possibilities! This is going to be great!
As I open my planner, I realize that my desire to engage in sabbath with focus and goals is in tension with my desire to enter into an eternal palace of time and trust in God’s focus and God’s goals. I have actually planned out my sabbatical rather well (for an ENFP). A rhythm of things to help me Begin Again over the next three months. Time for learning. Time for physical activity. Time for reflection. They ebb and flow through the months with hiking trips and art classes and placing myself under the mentorship of my siblings to experience their wisdom. It is not that I lack a plan. It is that the very essence of sabbath invites me to to wrestle with accepting rest in God’s love as a goal, a part of the plan all by itself.
Rabbi Heschel writes in his book The Sabbath, “[One] who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil. [One] must go away from the screech of dissonant days, from the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling [one’s] own life… Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul… Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self.”
My self is so defined and nurtured and developed in relationship to the goals and focus of the six days of labor, that I am not quite sure who I am on the seventh day. I long to live in my naked sabbath skin. To know deeply that I am a part of God’s creation, unconditionally good, no matter what I do. I am blessed by God with the invitation to co-create alongside God in the six days of my vocational labor. But I am commanded to rest with God on the seventh day, trusting that everything God has made can survive without my direct supervision. As I look at my sabbatical goals, I realize that I must hold open time for God’s focus and God’s plans to unfold. True rest is an act of faith, trusting that my identity and worth is centered in my relationship with God, not my relationship with my labor. Understanding that I am betraying my true eternal identity when I seek to embezzle my own life through my own labor and goals.
Today is Saturday. I will attempt to observe the commandment to rest on the seventh day and care for the seed of eternity planted in my soul.
