Life is not just doing one thing. A young child can focus his or her attention on the present activity and happily continue without regard for the future or the next things. We take great delight in watching our grandson’s focus when he finds a task or game pleasing. After all, play is his vocation at this stage of his life. It is how he works out the things that he needs to learn. Through play he is learning how to get along with others, how to be considerate and compassionate and how to make his way in this world. Through play he examines different scenarios and possibilities for how he might engage in adult life when he is ready. Play is his way of learning many of the lessons that he will need later in life. In many tribal cultures, the distinction between play and work doesn’t really exist. Children naturally imitate parents. When they do so, their behavior is encouraged. Adults make child-sized tools for children to use in assisting with cooking, housework, and hunting. When they are successful, they are praised and rewarded. Soon the life of an adult who contributes to the community is a natural way of life.

In our society, we often make large distinctions between play and work. We count the hours of work carefully as if it were an activity for 40 hours a week only. We rarely notice that some of the best creative thinking relative to our work don’t happen when we are “at work,” but rather when we are engaging in recreation. We count the days until a vacation and then head off for something that we don’t do in the normal course of our lives. People join gyms to “work out” instead of having physical activity integrated into their regular lifestyles. A physician friend once commented to me that if people would simply walk to the gym instead of driving, they’d be a lot more healthy. We tend to live far from our work and shopping, so we use cars to get about our daily life, sitting when our bodies have been designed for standing and walking.

In this compartmentalized world, our vacation is coming to an end. There is already a long list of tasks that I need to accomplish tomorrow. Most of the community is focused on a holiday weekend in celebration of July 4, and our church office won’t be open that day, so tomorrow is our day to get out the bulletins, catch up on pastoral concerns, answer e-mail, change the phone messages and get back to work. Then there are a couple of days of preparation for worship on Sunday. I meet with a couple planning a wedding and there are other events that take place on the weekend, so we will be back in the swing of things soon.

As we travel, we visit with other people who are traveling. We have met some full-time RVers, who live in their recreational vehicles year round and travel from state to state. They usually seek warmer climates for their winter activities and tend to drift towards the north in the summers. They often stay parked in the same location for weeks at a time, working temporarily at a campground or other tourist venue before moving on to the next location. They get to travel a lot and see a lot of beautiful country and they tend to spend much of their time in tourist destinations such as national and state parks, national forests and other places. Some of the commercial campgrounds rely heavily upon them as their pool of seasonal laborers who run check-in counters, mow lawns, clean shower houses and do other necessary chores.

That particular lifestyle doesn’t appeal to me. I’ve never been much of a person to want to stop working. I am blessed to have meaningful work that I enjoy. I miss the people and activities of the church when I travel and after a while, I am ready to return to my job and the busy life of a growing congregation. I enjoy the days when I don’t wake to the sound of my alarm and don’t have a list of appointments in my schedule, but I know that I also thrive on the lists of difficult problems to solve and challenges to overcome that are built into my job. At this stage of my life it works well for me to have a regular job with occasional breaks for vacation.

Of course it is difficult living so far away from our children, but we would have that challenge regardless of where we lived. Our two children live nearly 2,000 miles apart. No matter where we lived, it would be a long drive to visit either. At the present moment, we’re roughly half way between the two, which is as convenient as any other location. We make use of our vacations and of unlimited telephone calling as ways to stay connected. We also have the computer and video conferencing as another way to maintain our relationships.

Family is a priority for our children, too, so they make the effort to come to see us and in recent years, we have been very fortunate to have several events when we get the entire family together. Last year we all got together to celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary. In August we’ll all be together for a niece’s wedding. Sometimes we all get together for Christmas.

So we develop a rhythm of work and recreation. When we get things right, the recreation helps us to be more efficient and creative in the work. That is a bit of a problem when we take vacations like this one where we compress the bulk of the travel into a few days at the beginning and a few days at the end of the vacation. The process of driving requires effort and leaves us tired after a long day’s drive. But we seek to balance that with the wonderful memories of the time we had with our grandchildren and the meaningful work we have at the other end of the drive.

We are blessed to have jobs that allow us this rhythm and support the fullness of our lives that contain both work and recreation.

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