SabbaticalReport,PartII

with something that does not happen nearly enough: a kid-less few days away for Heather and I As I shared in a recent sermon, I found an AirBNB that is also a 33-foot boat in Carolina Beach and rented it. The weekend that followed was spent watching sunsets from the deck, eating seafood at our favorite spots, and walking on the boardwalk It was quiet and it was restful.

Week Three: Small Town Fun

Week three was mostly spent around Benson where I ran into a few of you who asked "can we even talk to you while you're on sabbatical?" (Thank you for talking to me it would have been an awkward six weeks if you'd all ignored me around town!).

During this week, Devon I made multiple trips to the public library (they even had a ton of free books, many of which were by a fiction author I discovered on Sabbatical: David Baldacci!). We also visited the Benson Pool, caught up on the newest season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and I even hosted trivia (90s themed of course) at Salvaged Heirlooms On Tuesday of this week I chaperoned the Children's Retreat for Will (as a parent, not as a pastor)! It was a week of staycationing, but a week that also reminded me of how appreciative I am to live in a town where I can be a neighbor as much as a pastor

Kennedy, and my brother Daniel out to Raven Rock for Kennedy's first tentcamping trip (Jackson was working). While the weekend did include some tears (a three-year-old with no air conditioning, nor all of her Barbies) it was overall a success that included laughs, s'mores, and coffee brewed on the fire.

Week Four: Lazy Checklists

By this point you might be wondering why I didn't 'go away' during the entirety of my sabbatical like others do. The answer to that is mostly that Heather was not on sabbatical and would have not appreciated me disappearing for six weeks! That said, week four was spent once again around Benson. During these days of rest I explored even more Hyrule, read all three books in David Baldacci's "Atlee Pine" series, and cleaned out the attic storage of the house that had become less organized than it was three years and seven months ago when we moved in Since Devon was around, I took him to lunch a few days and made him walk around Walmart with me (hey, he got a yo-yo out of it!). It was a week of lazy todos around the house, but it was still recharging in a way.