Can you believe it, we are half way through 2010!?! It seems like I took down my Christmas decorations just the other day 🙂 Time marches on and we just need to adjust. Yet so many of us think that we can adjust simply by taking a break from life.

I happen to live across from an elementary school and the other day I saw the happy faces on the children as the end of another school year came to a close and summer vacation began!! I also saw the sad faces on some of the parents, knowing their children would be home for 3 long months!!

Can you remember how happy you were when the last day school came and you began your summer vacation? (For some of us this will really tax our brain.) No more homework, no more getting up early, no more tests, no more hearing the teacher say open your books etc. etc. You were now entering 3 long months of  rest and recreation. Ahh for those good old days again, right 🙂 The biggest thing summer meant for me was that it was going to be a break from school and I could hardly wait for that to happen.

Sometimes we feel the exact same way as Christians. Maybe we have been so involved in either serving the Lord or going to Bible studies or whatever and we just feel we need a break. That  may all be true but the problem comes when our break, our time of rest,  bleeds into our relationship with our Lord.  In Isaiah 29:13a the Lord spoke a harsh word against the nation of Judah. “The Lord says, These people come near to Me with their mouth and honor Me with their lips but their hearts are far away from Me.”  Wow, can anyone of us not sadly admit that we have been there at one time or another. We go to church, we sing the songs, we hug  our brothers and sisters and we listen to the message but our hearts are somewhere else. Maybe it is because we have been hurt or disillusioned in some way by the church or someone in the church. Maybe we think no one notices or cares that we are even there. I could list many other reasons  as to why our hearts are sometimes far away but not one of them justifies a reason for our relationship with the Lord to go by the wayside.

Don’t get me wrong, we all need a time for a vacation to get away from it all for a short time to charge our batteries up again but we must never allow the time of our vacation to also  include a time of vacation from our relationship with our Lord.  Jesus says in Matthew 11:28 “Come unto Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” 

Aren’t we so glad that the Lord never takes a break from us and boy you couldn’t blame Him even if He did, could you?  Lamentations 3:22-23 “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.”

If we can see that the Lord is so faithful to give us His new compassion every morning, should that not speak clearly and loudly to our hearts that we must never take a break from our relationship with Him? 

This rule also applies to our brothers and sister in the Lord. Hebrews 11:25 “Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another – and all the more as we see the Day approaching.”  We need each other today more than ever in these tough times that our nation is in. The Lord never called us to be “Lone Ranger Christians.”

So as I close, enjoy your summer vacation or break, take some time to rest but never take a break from being in fellowship and relationship with the Lord and with one another, for that is the one thing we cannot do 🙂