I am on sabbatical during the month of August 2013.  I am already past the mid-point but only now do I have internet access to post to my blog.  I will be posting my journal that I keep daily, beginning with Day 1.

Day 1, August 3, 2013    

Stillspeaking devotional this morning was about making our days count.  So teach us to count our days, that we gain a wise heart." - Psalm 90:12.  Great opening for a sabbatical.  I will count down the days.  I’m already thinking 40 days would have been better.  Everything in the Bible was 40 days or 40 years.  No matter how many days, my aim is to make my days count when I get back, each day.

My last official act before sabbatical was picking up at Food Lion for the food pantry.  A2H did not pick up on Friday so I hauled off 350 pounds, almost half bread and pastries.   That’s a lot of bread.  It took a while to sort it, weight it in, and find places to put everything.  I was soaked with sweat, as usual when I got home.

Rusty knew something was really up when we packed up his crate to go with us.  I think even he notices that we are all more present together.  Without planning it we, Kay and I that is, are talking to each other more already.  It’s certainly not that we don’t talk, but there are always so many distractions like TV, going through mail, some place for me to rush off to.

Kay was driving and I was directing to the Clary’s house on the lake.  I knew about where the turn off of Hwy 21 was but couldn’t remember the name of the road.  I knew it was something appropriate.  There it is, “Eureka.”  Really, Eureka Road by Eureka Lake.  I’ve found it!

We went to Brown’s Country Café to eat supper.  It’s toward Sylvania.  We have tried to eat there before but it was always closed when we stopped by.  It used to be a country store.  Low and behold, church members walked in.  Deb and Tommy Snooks had the same idea.  It was good to see them and to be seen on sabbatical.

This already feels great.  Ready to read until an early bedtime.

I first heard of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (DB) when I flew my Piper Comanche to Americus, Georgia, in the late 1970s, with a Presbyterian minister and two other friends going to check out Koinonia Partners.  I stayed in the Bonhoeffer Room in the guesthouse.  Many years later, in 1986, I traveled to Germany, while in seminary, on a Bonhoeffer study tour hosted by a German campus ministry who owned Bonhoeffer’s family home in Berlin. I met a retired bishop who had been one of his students in the Confessing Church seminary.  But today is the first time I have journeyed with Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  My question for my spiritual mentor and myself is, “Are those feelings of fatigue from being overwhelmed by many things or simply from resisting the yoke that Jesus calls light?”