The Long Withdrawal: Vacations and Retreats

Last Monday I asked you to name your Sabbath day for the fall and to tell your board you are keeping it. This week we go longer than a day, because a weekly Sabbath keeps a pastor steady, but it cannot do everything. Some restoration only comes through extended withdrawal, and Scripture is not shy about saying so.

Luke tucks it into one sentence that is easy to read past: “But he would withdraw to desolate places and pray” (Luke 5:16). Pay attention to the tense. Not “he withdrew once, early on.” He would withdraw. It was his habit. And Luke places that sentence exactly where we would least expect it, right after telling us the crowds were growing and more people were coming to hear him and to be healed. At the moment momentum would lead us to stay, Jesus left. If the Son of God built long withdrawals into a ministry that lasted three years, I do not know how the rest of us plan to skip them across a ministry that lasts thirty.

Elijah shows us what happens when a leader tries. First Kings 19 finds him a day’s journey into the wilderness, fresh off the greatest public victory of his life at Carmel, asking God to let him die. What God does next should shape how every pastor thinks about exhaustion. There is no rebuke. There is no leadership lesson. There is sleep, and food, and more sleep, and more food, and a word of plain mercy: “Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you” (1 Kings 19:7). Only after the rest does the word of the Lord come at Horeb. God treated the prophet’s depletion as real, and he treated rest as the remedy.

So let me distinguish two practices that pastors routinely blur together. They do different work, and neither can substitute for the other.

A vacation is rest and delight with the people you love. Its purpose is recreation in the older sense of the word: being re-created. That means the sermon file stays closed and the inbox stays shut. A vacation that gets eaten by guilt, sermon prep, or one more funeral is not a vacation; it is work relocated to a nicer view, and you will come home from it more tired than you left. So set the rules before you go: who covers pastoral emergencies, what actually counts as one, and when the church will hear from you again. Then keep the rules you set.

A retreat is something else. A retreat is not a vacation, and it is not a conference either. It is unhurried time alone with God for the sake of hearing again. You bring less, not more: a Bible, a journal, and enough silence for the noise of ministry to settle. Nobody is fed by your retreat on the day you take it. They are fed for months afterward by a pastor who has actually heard from God rather than one who is recycling what God said years ago. And a retreat does not require money or distance. Twenty-four hours at a camp, a retreat center, or a borrowed cabin will do.

Healthy pastors plan both into the year before the year happens. I said it when this series opened: health does not come from intentions; it comes from architecture. The year will never hand you a convenient week for either of these. Fall will fill, then Advent will arrive, then the spring calendar will be set, and the withdrawal you meant to take will quietly become the withdrawal you meant to take last year. You place these weeks on the calendar first, or the calendar places something else there for you.

We are building this into district life, not just recommending it. A pastors’ prayer retreat is coming this fall. The date will be announced soon, and when it is, I am asking you to claim it. And in 2027 we will hold the first Pastor and Spouse Retreat in the history of the Crossroads District, because our listening year told us plainly that the spouses who carry this calling alongside our pastors have too often been left outside the circle of care. A planning team for that retreat is forming now. If you or your spouse would help shape it, email the district office.

Here is the practice for this week. Open your calendar to the next twelve months and place two things on it in writing: one full vacation and one retreat. Do it before the fall schedule fills in around you. Then tell two parties what you have done: your board, so the time is protected, and your family, so the time is promised.

​Next Monday: a number from our listening year, 4.8 out of 10, and the relationships no pastor should lead without.