Sabbaticals

It has been two weeks since my last confession here.

You know, I kinda' like the scholarly professions in which people are encouraged to take an occasional sabbatical. I think I am wired for taking time away from the normal routine every so often - some folks do it for an entire year.

I think in most professions that involve the need to make a profit - most folks would be concerned about being deemed unnecessary if they could take off a year and the business not suffer.

Anyway, I said all that to say that I haven't been on a sabbatical over these past two week when I was AWOL from my SoJourn posts.

I'm not sure where I've been. I will say that with the exception of the "snow" weekend, every other weekend in January was taken... January is now the official "retreat" season and I had two to attend, we had a birthday weekend for Ab and it has just been a busy month.

When I was considering going into bloggery a year and one-half ago, I looked around and discovered that all along the way there were blogs that sat vacant... they were started with a lot of excitement and then they fizzled. I did not want to be the purveyor of such a blog.

So along with my penitence for being derelict in my duties, I will try and explain how other things have taken precedent.

I have picked up a couple of things that I had laid down. Not bad habits necessarily - actually good ones - just some that had fallen into disuse: reading and learning guitar.

I am not an avid reader but have, for the past 15 years or so, set a goal of reading 20 books each year (sometimes more). It is a goal I seldom reach but I usually will make a respectable stab at it. (This comes as a slight embarrassment as I realize that my wife has mentioned on her blog - God's Design Not Mine - that used to read 30-40 books per year).
Last year the numbers did not look pretty. I won't say how many I read but it was less than 10 ... I take some satisfaction in the fact that I cannot give a completely accurate account since the computer where I kept my official list has met an untimely demise.

So my brother-in-law (whom I hazard to guess - IS an avid reader and reads some "heady" stuff too) loaned me a book over the holidays and I am plodding through it now. The book is "The Forgotten Man" by Amity Schlaes. Perhaps I will write more about this later but it is a winner!! I had to go back and check the copyright date to be sure it wasn't written after the onslaught of the Obama administration. The parallels between our present day events and the Roosevelt administration are scary!

I am also involved in some other reading - AA and I have taken to reading Robert Louis Stevenson's' "Kidnapped" at a rate of about one chapter per night.

And finally, since I am trying to learn all I can about Calvinism and Reformed Theology - I am reading a tiny little book about Calvin by John Piper.

Over the holidays, I took a renewed interest in picking a little on the guitar . . . AA and I usually work on his Christmas songs for the annual Music Recital and then we get some opportunities to pick a little with families. A friend at work (who is a pretty accomplished artist) recommended that I just pick it up and play about fifteen minutes a day. So I've tried to do that.

Then there's Upward Basketball. Both our kids are involved. It's been about three years since Ab played Basketball and then she was more interested in the pretty lights on the scoreboard than the game.

At this point I should note that R. and I have focused on becoming involved in less for a number of years now. It is our hope to keep our lives in "big chunks" as Dave Ramsey would say.

This minimalist perspective means that adding the one night of basketball practice and one Saturday each week for games - throws our life into helter skelter.

I really have a lot of regard for the Upward Basketball program and appreciate both the discipleship portion of the program as well as the fact that they are learning some fundamentals of the sport.

So that's what I've been doing. It's not a semester in Paris but it is proving to be somewhat enlightening.