My Sabbatical: Completed

Thanks to a generous policy approved by the elder council, pastors are allowed (even encouraged) to take time away for a sabbatical. I concluded my sabbatical last week.

I thought you’d like to know what Nanette and I did during our three weeks away. Our time broke into four parts:

1. The Christian Writer’s Conference.
We spent the first weekend at the Billy Graham Cove in Asheville, NC, where we attended a conference for Christian writers. There were about 200 people there, including the faculty. I learned a lot about the publishing industry, and I won Honorable Mention in one of the writing contests!

2. A week and a half of lollygagging.
After we left the conference, we worked our way through North Carolina and Virginia, stopping in three places, where we had absolutely no agenda. Every morning, we got up when we wanted to and went where we wanted to (antique stores, thrift stores, historical sites) and ate when and where we wanted to. It was gloriously unproductive and restful.

3. Museum of the Bible
Ever since the Museum of the Bible opened in 2017, I’ve wanted to go and see it. On the advice of others who have been before, we allocated two days to take it all in. And it did not disappoint. This was a bucket-list experience for both of us, a world-class museum experience.

4. Visiting with family
Even though our entire family had gathered at our house in February, we couldn’t be so close to our two sons and their families and not drop in for a visit before we came home. We spent a couple of days with our son Benjamin and his wife in Maryland, then headed north to spend a couple of days with our son Nathan and his family before we headed home last week.

And in case you’re wondering, I didn’t make as much progress on the reading as I had hoped.

• A Burning in My Bones, by Will Collier, a biography of Eugene Peterson, translator of The Message. I finished the book on the trip. Peterson was a fascinating man, a pastor who became a writer.
• The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives, by Dallas Willard. I got a good start on this excellent resource, which is available on our Discipleship Resource shelf.
• A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World, by Paul Miller. I also got a good start in this book but didn’t finish it.
• I began reading Gentle and Lowly with Nanette. I’ve read the book twice before, it’s that good. I wrote about it in my post “That Time I Was So Wrong about God,” December of 2021. Now I am sharing it with my bride, reading it aloud. I can’t recommend this book too much.
• And it should come as no surprise that I bought several books while I was gone, which is part of the reason I didn’t finish the books I took with me.

We enjoyed safe travels all the way, and good health. We are grateful to PPC for allowing us this time to rest and refresh, and we are so very glad to be back home with our church family. We tuned in to the Livestream, but we missed being with you.

Persevere,
Paul Pyle
Pastor of Discipleship