This last month has been extremely hectic for me. My wife and I went on vacation, moved across the state and I started school full time. Although life has been crazy, I welcome the fact that things are slowing down again. This week, I wanted to talk about vacations and getting away from a biblical angle.

Vacations are great things. They allow us to get away and relax for a period of time so that we can come back recharged and re-energized for a new season of work, school or whatever it may be. While I was away, this idea of what a vacation is got me thinking about how Jesus never took a vacation in the sense of sitting on a beach somewhere soaking up the sun but he did make a point of taking time to get away and recharge.

Jesus made it a point to spend some time reconnecting with his heavenly Father. He realized, being fully human, that we need to take moments and set them aside for recharging. We need to set aside times where we are able to spend time letting God speak with us and recharge our spiritual batteries. There are many times in scripture that Jesus leaves the crowds and the chaos, which followed him most of his adult life, to spend some time with his Father. In Matthew chapter 14 we see that Jesus, after hearing about the death of his cousin John the Baptist, goes away to a solitary place in a boat. The crowds however saw where he was headed and ran around the lake to the other side so that when he got there they were waiting.

So here is the Son of God, who is fully human, trying to deal with the death of someone that he loved and he is trying to recharge and receive some peace from his heavenly father. Instead, he is followed and clamored upon for healing by the masses. The beautiful thing is that he does not send them away but has compassion on them and meets their needs. But as we read further, after he has just had this great teaching moment and miraculous event with the feeding of the five thousand, he sends his disciples on ahead of him so that he will be able to spend some time alone with his father. Verse twenty-three says that he goes up a mountainside to pray.

So even though this is not a vacation in the traditional modern sense it is a picture of Jesus making a point to get away from the stresses of the world to be poured into by God. This is such a great example of Jesus' humanity. I can relate with the fact that life comes fast and can seem overwhelming.

I am not sure about you but when I get bogged down with a project or stressed with something that has a deadline, the last thing that I want to do is take a moment and be quiet. I don't have the time to slow down for even a second, let alone a minute or an hour, or for that matter a day. But it is in these times that we can find strength by drawing on the one who is the source of strength. It is in these times that we find ourselves being poured into by the one in heaven who loves us and has great things planned for us.

Final Thought: This week, I challenge you to make it a point to take a "time-out" and spend some time with your Father. Schedule some time to plug in to our source of life and let him renew and refresh you. It is in our times of full dependence on him that we can be most effective at whatever it is we are doing.