St. Martha Takes a Break

At first, I thought it was rather ironic that I’ll be on vacation on the feast day of the woman I consider my patron saint (in a completely Reformed way, naturally): St. Martha. But what’s a feast day for except, well, feasting? Even, maybe especially, Marthas deserve a little holiday.

Not that we couldn’t use some work on this front. I saw a New Yorker cartoon last week that really summed it up:

“Fallow” is a very old word, indeed—all the way back into Old English. We’ve long known it’s essential for the land, but I wonder how deliberately we think of strategies for ourselves.

A surgery at the beginning of this summer forced me into a long period of “fallowness.” Doctor’s orders meant a break from work, from important meetings, for rest and more rest and then even more. Some friends wondered how I’d do. Turns out (spoiler alert!) things went just fine without me. And for me, with permission to rest, I did fine, too. Better than fine, actually.

In a culture of productivity, how are you giving yourself space for fallowness? What areas of your life might it be okay to let rest and regenerate for a while? What’s on your “to NOT do” list?