If you know me, you know I’m serious about rest.  Let’s be clear: that’s NOT the same as being lazy (which to my knowledge I haven’t been called since my teen years).  Rest is critical for every living breathing human being (and most animals) because that’s the way God made us.  (This post will be a simple snippet on the topic of rest, but if you’d like a beefier stew, check out “The Rest of Us”; a post I did nearly 3 years ago on the issue of rest. You can go right to it by clicking here.)  It just amazes me how rest gets tossed aside as a victim of our circumstance, as if its not one of the ten commandments.

The church I serve (Southside Church) is a fantastic ministry that cares well for its staff.  That being said, I get a certain amount of vacation days per year.  Last month, I found that I had 13 days of vacation time remaining with no real plan for how to use those days; no big family trips coming up, no major surgery planned etc.  So, I decided for the most part to pepper my vacation days over the landscape of the next few months.  And in the month of February, I’ve taken the “every Monday off” approach.  Today was my first.  As suspected, I loved it.  My wife doesn’t work on Mondays, my kids are in school, and so its just The Hotness and I doing what needs to get done or whatever we feel like doing.  Pretty sweet.

For the next 3 Mondays, I’m looking at days just like today–days of “Idunnowhatdoyouwanttodo?” with my favorite person on the planet.  I’m sure we might conjur up some actual plans at some point, but what a nice thing its going to be every Monday in February.

When I have some time on my hands, my mind typically thinks these thoughts in this order:

1. What NEEDS to get done? (A closet to organize? A Goodwill dropoff run to make? A repair in/around the house that’s been waiting?)

2. What MUST get done?  (A kissing cousin of #1, but this might be of a more urgent nature, such as “If I don’t get those videos back to the library, I’m going to pay a fine. And I’ll be darned if I’m paying the library anything!”)

3. What WANTS to be done? (This is the stuff that has virtually no purpose but sheer enjoyment. I walk around Short Pump with my wife, sipping coffee and window shopping while chatting about anything & everything.)

And today we landed squarely on #3.  We drove where the wind blew us, strolled around, bought nothing but socks for our youngest and vacuum bags (oops, I guess there’s a little #1 in there), and ate Mexican for lunch.

Oh, and I broke my Dollar Tree “back-up” pair of shades.  I was using my back-up pair because I can’t find  my regular expensive pair of Dollar Tree shades.  Other than that, it was just another day in paradise.  And I’m already looking forward to next Monday.