It was a family emergency, of all things, that solved my vacation problem.
My 17-year-old daughter was in a mental health crisis and needed residential care immediately. My husband and I had spent a week sleeping outside her room on a makeshift mat by night and making dozens of calls by day. The only treatment center we could find was 1,000 miles away in Los Angeles.
We received the approval on Good Friday. “Admission is Monday at 9 a.m.,” the director said.
I put down the phone shakily. I was grateful to have gotten this far yet felt that the journey was too much. Jesus Christ had already demonstrated his great love for me on the cross. I threw myself into his arms, so to speak, and waited to be carried.
Many people prayed for us. A friend made us the most delectable roasted-garlic-and-feta potatoes for our Easter dinner, which we possibly ought to have canceled. Another friend booked the tickets for us to fly out on Easter evening. And another friend arranged for her Mennonite friends in LA to host us.
These friends—strangers to me—welcomed us, leading us to a quiet bedroom with towels folded on the table and palm trees glowing yellow through the dark windows. They offered us fruit and different breads for toast in the morning. They were a refuge in a strange land and under strange circumstances.
The author of Hebrews says that in showing hospitality one may entertain angels unaware (Heb. 13:2), and the converse is also marvelously true: By giving yourself over to the hospitality of others, you may be entertained by angels.
Nourished by these gifts, I set out from the strangers’ home on Easter Monday, not a new person exactly but able to get us to the treatment center. After I saw my daughter welcomed and safe, I said goodbye and wandered the bright streets, weepy with relief and wondering where to get tacos.
I like to refer to this trip as my Elijahic vacation. “Vacation” because of the travel. “Elijahic” because it reminds me of how the prophet received extraordinary help in a time of great need—hot bread, cool water, and deep sleep at a wilderness bed and breakfast run by an angel (1 Kings 19).
Our family’s problem is simply this: We can’t take vacation. We look like normal people who can relax, but reserving things in advance or scheduling time off work rarely happens. We don’t travel well, and we tire easily.
There were a few times in the early years when we thought we might have the magic. The winter after our three children arrived, we took them to the mountains for a long weekend. We looked forward to suiting them up in their adorable snow gear. We would go sledding and bond over hot cocoa and storybooks. Later, after we tucked the kids into bed, my husband and I would sit snug by the fire. A sweet first vacation.
It turned out that one child was very sensitive to cold. If her hands got the least bit chilled, they swelled painfully and made her scream. Being outside was miserable; we got disapproving looks from others. We spent the weekend stuck inside with too little to do and not enough toys. We nearly left early.
Okay, so that was a rookie mistake. Our family was new. We hadn’t even adopted our children yet; they were still our foster kids. We had plenty of time to figure it out.
‘Lord, When Did We See You in Foster Care?’
But vacation only got harder. For one thing, we had so many appointments. Our kids had serious health problems and needed doctor’s visits and medication refills. They needed therapy and special education. Sometimes they were in the hospital.
Then there was the cognitive load of managing each child’s “case.” All the calls and reminders and forms and bills and referrals added up. We made mistakes and forgot things and couldn’t keep the fridge stocked. We were not in a headspace to come up with interesting itineraries.
And truly, our family wasn’t normal and couldn’t relax. The kids needed near-constant supervision. That sounds obsessive, but in our case, it’s not. Before they could even talk, our children were swapped around from place to place, never the apple of anyone’s eye. It’s no wonder (and no fault of theirs) that they had no stable sense of self. That only comes from a caring family and community, an inheritance of love and belonging that undergirds the rest of life.
Without that foundation, some children are sensory seeking and impulsive, unable to learn cause and effect and lacking common sense. They may never grow out of this heartbreaking and dangerous reality. Without our intervention, our children rile each other up and get into sticky situations.
Probably our last real attempt at vacation was with family at a country house. We imagined our 10- and 11-year-olds could play in the front yard on a sunny spring day. We would keep an eye on them from the kitchen while we saw to dinner. When a few minutes had gone by and we hadn’t heard them, we went out to check. Far down the hill, a tractor was spraying manure slurry over a newly tilled field. And romping in the furrowed rows were our children, damp with toxic porcine sludge.
And I suppose that is when I knew. Vacation is not for us.
Seven more years have passed, and our family of five has still mostly failed at vacation. “Failed” sounds harsh and even entitled. Lots of people don’t travel overseas or go camping or sailing. They can’t afford it. They are in poor health or have trouble getting around. Some, like us, are caregivers to loved ones with complex needs.
Indeed, vacation has never been possible for everyone. In early 19th-century America, journeys for health and pleasure were the purview of elite Southern planters and wealthy Northerners. Trips have always required money and time. The “weekend” only developed in the 1920s, and before then, many laborers worked Monday through half of Saturday. Working-class families in New York City might take an occasional day trip to Coney Island, while affluent families might spend the summer at resorts or second homes up the Hudson.
As the middle class formed and travel got easier, though, vacation became an expected part of “the good life.” These days, at some level, taking vacation signals that things are going well for you, that you are competent and interesting, that you value “quality time” and “making memories” with your family. I have had to admit that the good life might not be for us.
This realization was a desolation—an indication that we were separate from God’s favor and from other people. It gave me much grief. I felt a pang when people told me they were going on a Disneyland adventure or mentioned a summer place on the beach. The cabins! Everywhere I turned, someone was going to one or coming back from one.
One time, some friends and I were discussing their upcoming plans, and cabins came up. Everyone agreed they were wonderful. Was I alone in my desolation? I couldn’t tell.
“Maybe cabins are overrated,” I suggested.
One of my friends leveled her gaze at me and paused two beats.
“False,” she said. She was almost stern.
In ancient Rome, wealthy patricians took vacation by heading to their country estates for healing baths to escape oppressive heat in the city. The poet Horace encouraged his peers to leave the din of Rome and spent time unwinding in the country. Some Roman towns near the sea developed unwholesome “spring break” reputations that poets Seneca and Martial deplored.
Today, vacation is still about taking a break from normal life and pursuing novelty, pleasure, and a “respite from unpleasantness,” to use a phrase from David Foster Wallace’s beloved cruise ship essay. Vacation involves a change in location. We “get away,” “escape,” and “go on holiday” to nicer places than where we spend our workaday lives.
It seems self-evident that vacation is necessary to flourishing. But is that biblical?
Leisure certainly is. Josef Pieper, a German Catholic philosopher writing after the Second World War, taught that this supremely human and spiritually enlightened “condition of the soul” was neither idleness nor mere fun but an active attunement to God’s presence and a cooperation with him in creation. Leisure emanates from the co-delighting persons of the Trinity. When we rest, when we delight, when we play, we affirm God’s image in us.
But vacation? I see nothing like that in the Bible. I see rest and delight, yes, and celebration and retreat and merrymaking—even pilgrimage. But I do not see vacation. That absence makes me wonder if God’s heart for us might not be vacation after all.
God has rest for us, of course, blessing us with sleep (Ps. 127:2) and establishing the rhythms of Sabbath. An important way that we understand entering into God’s kingdom is as “entering his rest” (Heb. 4).
And God has delight for us. He has embedded pleasure and beauty into our creaturely lives and promised joy in his presence and eternal pleasures at his right hand (Ps. 16:11). The Lord is an extravagant host (Luke 14:15; Rev. 19:9). Big chunks of Old Testament law provide for a godly society in which parties—of celebration and of lament—are thrown properly, regularly, and heartily (Lev. 23; Deut. 14:22–26).
Take the Feast of Booths as one interesting example: a major national, weeklong festival in the seventh month that starts and finishes with a sacred rest day, filled in between with everyone living in temporary huts, feasting and “rejoic[ing] before the Lord” (Lev. 23:40). While the temple still stood, as in Jesus’ time, the Feast of Booths often involved pilgrimage (John 7). Crowds in Jerusalem made music, recited psalms, prayed, sacrificed, ate, and drank in commemoration of liberation from Egyptian slavery and God’s guidance to the Promised Land. First-century observers like Josephus commented that the Jews’ celebration of the Feast of Booths in Jerusalem was a raucous, expensive, and extravagant affair—a party to end all parties.
Isn’t this a kind of vacation? My gut says no, though there was sometimes travel and no regular work and lots of planning—rearing or purchasing the animals, making the sacrifices, packing provisions, arranging for hut materials. But novelty was not expected beyond what the Spirit of the Lord might reveal in the prescribed liturgy. There was revelry, but in worship of the Lord God. Ritual sacrifices meant that death and life commingled in a sober, joyous occasion.
The biblical picture of refreshment differs from vacation in essential ways. Whereas vacation is taken, God’s refreshment is received. Vacation is usually a private arrangement; refreshment is for an entire community. Vacation is special and almost always occurs elsewhere; refreshment is meant as a routine provision for our regular lives. Vacation elevates personal pleasure; refreshment comes through rightly perceiving God and his activity in the world.
As far as we know, Jesus did not take vacation or teach about it, yet he mastered the practices of rest and delight laid out in the law and perfected them in his gospel. Jesus existed in a fluid state of working and resting in the Father (John 5:17; Matt. 11:27–30). Guided by the Holy Spirit, he took the refreshment that came his way. It was quite hand-to-mouth. He dined comfortably and sometimes without invitation at people’s houses (Luke 19:5–9; Mark 2:15–17; John 12:1–3). He accepted their resources, once or twice without asking (Luke 8:3; Mark 11:1–8). He enjoyed sleep even in stressful circumstances (Matt. 8:24). He often observed Sabbath by healing and forgiving sins (Mark 1:21–32). He went on retreat occasionally but let people freely interrupt him for “work”—healing, teaching, feeding (Mark 6:30–44; Matt. 12:15). In paying affectionate attention to those around him, he let the Spirit’s tenderness and compassion minister to him.
He was the Shepherd and the Lamb. He was the host and the guest. He was always at work and always at leisure. As he heralded the coming of his just and joyful kingdom, established the church, and sent the Holy Spirit, vacation was superfluous.
The vacationlessness of Jesus comforts me, for I have a Savior who sympathizes. My family may not spend this summer at a cabin, but we will have other accommodations prepared for us. We cannot manufacture our own magic, but we find his supernatural gifts poured into our ordinary life. He has already shown himself capable of providing rest and delight in the least likely situations and without our help, as in Los Angeles.
A summer with nothing planned seems boring, but it too is a gift because it means that we are around—for the routine blessings of Sabbath and worship as well as many marvelously unplanned divine connections. We are available to our neighbors and local church. Through impromptu gatherings, haphazard dinners, acts of service; at the Lord’s Table, in prayer, in the laying on of hands, and through the occasional prophetic word; we are present to the Holy Spirit. We minister and are ministered to and see his wonders in our lives. Occasionally we do need to travel, and we have found ourselves in cities and in farm towns, by friends, family, and strangers, feted with extraordinary hospitality and friendship.
These gifts are a down payment of the rest and delight that the Lord is bringing about in his coming kingdom for me and my children. Only Providence can provide the inheritance of belonging and love that we lack and long for.
“One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, but live “unreservedly in life’s duties.” In this way, he says, we “throw ourselves completely into the arms of God.”
I am not saying that a sightseeing trip is bad or that it’s wrong to want a week at the beach. I am saying that by abandoning any attempt to take a specific kind of vacation, we throw ourselves into the arms of God and find gifts far superior to anything we might ask or imagine.
Vacation may yet come to me. But it may not. For the present, I have a delightful inheritance, and the boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. I cannot wish for anything better.
Wendy Kiyomi is an adoptive parent, scientist, and writer in Tacoma, Washington, whose work on faith, adoption, and friendship has also appeared in Plough Quarterly, Image, Mockingbird, and The Englewood Review of Books. She is a 2023 winner of the Zenger Prize.
