Now's the Time // A Time of Refreshing in My Life, Part 1

Getting some balance back in our lives is a challenge for a lot of people.  Either we're doing too much or not enough and somehow, life's out of kilter.  What we need is some refreshment for our souls.

I don't know about you but one of the things that many people struggle with is getting a sense of balance in their lives. Either life's just so crazy and hectic that we seem to be burning the candle at both ends and eventually we burn out or for other people life's really, really quiet, lonely perhaps.

All lifestyle magazines push this whole "life balance" thing, great cooking, meals with friends, exotic holidays, happy families. And then you go and look at that stuff and go, "hang on a minute, my life doesn't look like that" and we feel even worse.

What we all need at some point, in fact daily I think, is a time of refreshing, you know to renew our strength, to lift us up, to breath some joy into our souls.

My wife Jacqui and I, we're a bit like that, we're working really hard at the moment and just the last few months have been really tough from a ministry and a work perspective. Now on the one hand it's a real joy and a pleasure. We get to work together, we get to do something that touches peoples lives and it's great. But when you're working long and hard, day after day after day, it takes it's toll doesn't it?

In a sense ministry should be easy, well in a sense it is. So often I'm really tired. And in fact as I was preparing for today, to share this message with you, I was really tired. I was overseas last week in the USA so the time difference was knocking me around and yet God put a real holy ease, He was there. He blessed me and He just made it work for me.

But the flip side of that is running a ministry, it's a tough gig. There's fundraising and managing staff and producing content and I'm writing a book at the moment and reporting to the board. All of these things that people don't see and yet they're essential to doing what it is that I do.

You have the same, you have things in your life that people see and there's a whole bunch of other things that they don't see but that are grinding, that are hard work sometimes and so Jacqui and I said, "Look it's really time for a break".

Now every now and then, maybe two or three times a year, we grab a weekend away somewhere just to have a rest. But we thought, "no, we really need a break". So just recently we booked a holiday in a place called, Lord Howe Island. If you haven't heard of Lord Howe it's a beautiful island about two hours flight from Sydney in Australia. It's world heritage listed, only 250 visitors are allowed on the island at once.

There are no theme parks or theatres or tacky pinball parlours. It's a world heritage listed spectacular island. Soaring mountains, (I think the mountains soars six thousand feet up out of the ocean bed), beautiful beaches, virgin forests, lagoons. It's hard to think of a more, well idyllic setting and I have to tell you something, we are really looking forward to it.

There's something about rest and beauty, a sense of anticipation, a change in scenery, getting away. We all yearn for that and there's nothing wrong with that. You bring rest and real beauty together and you know, it just refreshes the soul. It brings us back to life. It does something that renews us inside.

And if we have a busy life, we actually need to plan those things. We need to decide to set aside the time, to invest the dollars and go and have a holiday and maybe if we have a quiet, lonely life, "I won't go on my own, it's not worth it", what rubbish. Maybe if you're in that camp you just need some motivation.

When I was coming back from America last week I flew via Tahiti. It was just the airfare I was able to get and I was sitting next to a woman between Los Angeles and Tahiti and she was going to Tahiti on her own. and she said, "Look, I've been working hard. I've been really busy and I've just decided to take a holiday and have a rest". Good on her, I think that's what we all need to do at some point.

This week on A Different Perspective we're looking at this whole issue of refreshing. We all need times of refreshing so we're going to look at it over the next few days, just from different angles, different perspectives.

It's great to plan a holiday but what about refreshment right in the middle of life. I mean in the daily cut and thrust, in the grind, in the every day, here and now. If we spend all of our time looking forward to escaping, "I hate my job, I hate the grind…"

Here's a thought, if God is God, if God put us here, shouldn't day to day life be, I don't know, something to enjoy? I don't mean a 24x7 cocktail party, that's not realistic, life's not like that. It's not all bubbly and fruity and wonderful every day. But as we live our life through our family, through our responsibilities, through our work, through our