  On Sunday morning, The Christian Church of Pacific Grove gave me a tremendous send off. During the section of the worship service given to prayers of the people, all elders in attendance thoughtfully presented me with a new journal and then offered a sending prayer. Lots of well wishes, a pot luck dinner, and a care package full of low carb snacks and gift items folks from the congregation figured I could use while driving around America’s mainland for three months. I am on sabbatical. My covenant with the Christian Church grants me this three month period at the end of every five years of service as it’s pastor. When I earned the Masters of Divinity from the Pacific School of Religion in 1999, I asked some elder clergy to mentor me. Most of them strongly recommended that I request periodic Sabbatical time and that no matter what is going on in the church, I take it. It evidently is a self-care issue. The initial covenant (contract) with the church was negotiated in the pastor’s study (my office) with the president of the congregation and the chief financial officer. I was working through my last semester of seminary studies and I didn’t have much time to think about what I needed to bring to the discussion. I contacted my regional minister and he said, “Did anyone tell you to insist on sabbatical time?” So I entered the conversation fully aware that the only thing that was a deal-breaker was getting sabbatical time which we agreed would be a three month time off, every five years. The problem was that the initial covenant was for one year and somehow we decided that the language about sabbatical didn’t need to be included until my fifth annual covenant was written. It was a problem, because this delicate meeting discussing my salary, benefits, and other expectations was not heralded to the congregation. As year four approached, I began to talk about making plans for my sabbatical at a Board of Director’s meeting and some of the Director’s gave me the deer-in-the-headlights mug.
They demanded, “Who told you that you would get that much time off?” Thanks be to God cool heads prevailed and the initial discussion was remembered. The current Board of Elders wrote the sabbatical language into my fifth annual covenant. What is a sabbatical? I plan to collect wisdom about this question during the next three months. Steve Eulberg called today to say “Happy Sabbatical”. Steve was driving by a evangelical church with God Doesn’t Take A Vacation! on the marquis. He thought to himself, “Sure God takes vacation… we call it Sabbath.” Sabbatical is a time of rest and refreshment.
Dr. Dick Hamm said to me, “One thing you need to remember about sabbatical time— don’t be the pastor!” Words like low-stress, self-examination and filling the cup come into the sabbatical conversation. I’ll take special note of wise people who give me their definitions of sabbatical in the next few months. 
