Today is the last day of the longest vacation I’ve taken since being a student (granted I had periods of medical leave and unemployment, but I wouldn’t exactly call those “vacations”). It’s somewhat bittersweet. I’ve really enjoyed my time on vacation, spending time in the Bahamas with my new bride, cleaning up the new apartment, running errands, doing laundry, and generally trying to be a good house husband by making breakfast, lunch, and dinner for Charlene.
A large part of this vacation has made me feel like I was a student again, taking an extended spring break, or an early summer vacation. It’s been fun to stay up late and wake up late the next morning. I’ve enjoyed reading in bed until I felt ready to get up, and generally having time to waste on Facebook, and catch up on a mountain of e-mail (Would you believe that for the duration of my honeymoon I received somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 e-mails, not including the deluge of Facebook notifications that people had messaged me or posted on my wall?)
But there is a part of me that is definitely looking forward to getting back to work. That’s “real life” in the “real world.” Unfortunately, vacation isn’t the reality, it is but a temporal part of our existence.
One funny little anecdoete: On our last day in the Bahamas, I commented to Charlene that I was looking forward to getting back to “real life.” She agreed and said she was really looking forward to getting back to our community–that is our friends at church, our families, and the people we work with. I agreed and said, “Yeah, I’m getting sick of you too.” I was joking of course, and she knew it. But I think the truth of the matter is that even though God has joined us together, He didn’t join us together at the exclusion of others in our life. He joined us together in marriage, that it would enhance not only the sense of fellowship and belonging between us, but that it would enhance the fellowship and belonging with us as well.
Our hope as a couple is to be a blessing to those around us, and to be more effective at that as a couple than we would be as two singles. To borrow the ridiculously overused consulting term: we should be creating “synergies” from our relationship. The combination should be greater than the sum of the parts. And we can only do that if we continue to live life in the “real world.” Vacations and honeymoons are good for a time, but that’s not all we were designed for.
As Tilden pointed out in his message at our wedding, we are to rest, work, and be broken. And it is really only within the context of our community that we are really able to work.
All that to say it’s bittersweet that I’m going back to work tomorrow.
Sorry for the length of this post. I had originally intended it to be a short note that I was going back to work tomorrow. Instead, it has turned into this rather lengthy dissertation on a plethora of topics. Then again, I suppose that’s why I’ve chosen to post it under the category of “Randoms/Musings.” Consider this a rather long musing from a married man on the verge of going back to work. I may or may not be posting as much in the next few days or weeks, especially as I get back into the swing of work. But I’ll do my best. Until then…Peace.
