A running joke in my house is that, someday, I’m going to run away and live with the gnomes.
It’s absurd, of course, in that there’s not really a little gnome commune in the woods somewhere I can disappear to. But it’s serious in that I do, from time to time, daydream about dropping everything and escaping. No demands. No expectations. Just rest. Being myself.
The daydreaming, it’s real
In the midst of shuffling your kids, doing the presentation, or fixing the laundry machine, you might have those kinds of daydreams, too. In fact, moms out there are admitting they even daydream about being in the hospital — not because they really love the hospital or want to be sick or hurt, but because in the hospital, you temporarily have no other responsibilities to worry about, there’s no guilt for the rest because you have to be there, and people take care of you.
Sometimes, I’ve felt guilty for having the daydreams I do. But daydreaming this way, I know, has a purpose and function. It’s a danger signal that warns you to move away from what’s potentially harmful, a consequence of being under pressure. And it’s not selfish just to want a moment to catch your breath and know somebody gives a da*n — it’s a natural need within being human.
The temptation to check in to rest but out of calling
As anybody who’s been through burnout knows, there is a point where you have to pause whether you like it or not. The body will insist on it. The proverbial car with no gas stops in the middle of the road.
But what about before that point?
What if you’re not sitting in the middle of the road but your gas tank has…like…barely a 16th left?
That’s where the daydreaming hits. And in the spiritual sense, it’s a dangerous place.
Do you need to refuel and retreat like Jesus did — not to the gnomes, but to God? Yes.
But in the pause, the temptation is to not want to get back on the road. To just sign the long-term paperwork and do an extended stay at the hotel next to the gas station. To make the temporary retreat a permanent refusal to return to the stress.
If I’m not careful, I get too lost in the mirage of what it might be like if I didn’t have to go back. I lose my sense of the mission and start wishing I wasn’t chosen. Wasn’t called. That all I had to do was eat grilled cheeses, snuggle, and then sleep as God cleaned stuff up.
But I am chosen. I am called.
So are you.
The time is not yet come
As tempting as it is to check in to the hotel, we can’t.
To pull on Jesus’ words in John 2:4, the “time is not yet come” to stop. Right now, God’s there giving everything we need to continue the journey. But the journey, as Robert Frost put it in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, has miles to go, and we have a promise to keep.
The promise to run the race (1 Corinthians 9:24).
To share Him (Matthew 28:19-20).
To save as many as we can, knowing that the night is coming and there will soon be a time when we can’t anymore (John 9:4).
Keeping your word with people matters, but it matters even more with God. What you have promised, fulfill, as He fulfills His own promises (Joshua 21:45). That’s what it is to love Him, to say you will do what He tells you and then truly do it (John 14:15).
It feels good to lie down in green pastures or a bed in the next-to-the-gas-station hotel (Psalm 23:2). But don’t put your clothes in the hotel closet when the mansion is still up ahead.
