I have lived too long where I am reachable.
B RAD IS A PASTOR WHOSE CHURCH IS GOING WELL. Attendance at weekend services is growing steadily, and they have just completed a building project that is enabling them to grow and provide a variety of ministries to meet needs within their growing congregation and the community surrounding them. People respond well to his preaching, and his church is known around town as being a church that cares. Brad is growing in stature and reputation among local leaders—even becoming a respected voice regarding important issues facing the community—which means he is in demand and attends many meetings. He is increasingly aware that it takes a full-time schedule and more to keep all the plates spinning. His two young children could use much more attention than he able to give them, and his wife is exhausted from picking up the slack from his busy schedule. When he looks in her eyes he sees a hollowness that mirrors the emptiness he feels in his own soul, but the demands of being a young pastor whose star is rising, the husband and father of growing family, and a soul that is longing for more seem mutually exclusive.
Jen is a stay-at-home mom with four kids. She loves being a mom and sees this as her highest priority, yet over the years she has had a niggling sense that there is something more she is supposed to do with herself and her gifts. Her husband travels regularly for work, which means the lion’s share of care for home and family falls to her; she has little time to devote to getting in touch with her spiritual desires and her sense of calling. Most of the time she is able to put aside her questions and desires in order to make sure everyone else’s needs are cared for, but lately they have been pressing in on her. She finds herself close to tears a lot, questioning her worth, questioning her motives, and wondering if she is doing enough for all the people who need her. She feels her sense of self slipping away and is alarmed by feelings of anger, unsettledness, and even depression.
Jeremy is a gifted entrepreneur who is just starting to achieve recognition for the work his creative company is offering. The phone is ringing with offers of more work than their company can handle, and they have even received a few awards for their work. At the same time, there are internal problems in the company—dissension in the ranks, stress fractures in the leadership, and temptations when he travels. Given the external accolades, he cannot understand why things feel so broken on the inside. He realizes that if he does not get some time away to reflect on what’s really going on, to listen to God, and to get a handle on his motivations and behaviors, he may ruin everything he’s worked so hard for due to bad decision making—decision making that is disconnected from discerning God’s presence and activity in his life.
When we hear the wordretreat many of us think of the military use of the word, which refers to the tactic troops use when they are losing too much ground, when they are tired and ineffective, and when there have been too many casualties or the current strategy is not working. When any of these scenarios are in play, the commander might instruct the troops to pull back and put some distance between themselves and the battle line. We often see this as a negative thing; however, military retreat can also be a wise tactic—an opportunity to rest the troops and tend to their wounds, to stop the enemy’s momentum, or to step back to get a panoramic view of what’s going and set new strategies. In fact, the military is now using a more positive term—strategic withdrawal—to describe retreat, and I like it!
Strategic withdrawal captures the more positive connotations of the wordretreat, namely, that there are times when the better part of wisdom in combatis to withdraw for good reasons—which can apply to us as well. There are times when we too need to pull back from the battle line in own lives rather than continuing to fight the same battles in the same old ways. We need to pull back from our busyness, from li
