Sharing a few words from a fellow Christ-following pilgrim I enjoy. She wrote this a few months ago after beginning a personal sabbatical.

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If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, did it still live a good and noble life worthy of the joy of the hiker or the home of its inhabitants or the nourishment its roots gave to other roots? That is, can a thing still be well and truly good, without being shared by the masses? Without the whole world weighing in on its goodness and merits?

Am I still a good writer and thinker, even if no one reads? Concretely: is what I’m writing right now any good, even if not a single one of you reads it all the way through? I have always known the answer to that is yes because what the work is doing in me is good, and that makes it good whether anyone reads it or not. It is me inhabiting my humanness and the image of God and that is always good.

The better question I’m asking these days is, “Am I loved by the God of the universe, even if no one notices my existence?” The answer to that is yes, but convincing me of it is a bit more complex. That is part of why we take sabbaticals. Not to vacate from our lives but to shrink back to a human size, to pinch our skin and ask if we are still us after the bloat goes down.

Turns out, friends, of course I am. And I am better for it. And this, more than anything is what makes work good: that when we live as we are and not as our metrics tells we are or ought to be, we’re all a little more healthy, a little more whole, a little more human.

Lore Wilbert, #

Photo by Heather Ford on Unsplash