Dear E-pistle subscriber,

I’ve had a delightfully boring week.

I write this from a friend’s beach house in the southern Outer Banks of North Carolina, where – with our family and other friends and their families – we’ve spent the last week on family vacation. (We’re packing now and getting ready for the seven-hour drive back to Leesburg.)

The week was delightfully boring. Not long after we arrived on Saturday, the kids (and there are twelve of them here!) started complaining, “There’s nothing to do here.”

“Precisely!” We adults thought, “and isn’t that wonderful?!?”

Being bored – having “nothing to do” – is part of the point of a vacation, as far as I’m concerned.

I realize there are lots of people who like to fill every waking hour of their vacation with routine, activities, sightseeing, and shopping. I realize there are lots of people who get restless just “sitting around” doing nothing. Perhaps you’re one of them, and if so, more power to ya – go have your fun, do your activities, bring me back a USA Today if you happen to see one, but I’ll be down there in the beach chair, developing my own routine:

1) Position chair facing sun

2) Dig feet in the sand

3) Read

4) Nap

5) Bodysurf/play with the kids/walk along the beach

6) Go back to chair, reposition chair to face sun

7) Repeat from step 2 forward

Ahhhhhh….

After a week of such routine – after a week of such nothingness, such mindlessness, such delightful boredom – I feel my gumption coming back, my zest for life, my enthusiasm.

And enthusiasm, as you know, has at its root en-theos, or “being filled with theos,” with God.

So maybe, just maybe, God knows what he’s up to when he commands us to observe times of Sabbath, times of doing nothing. Maybe God knows that at least for some of us, there’s a direct connection between having “nothing to do” and being recharged, re-energized, re-joyed.

See you Sunday,

Fr. John