How busy are you? Not just at work. Not just at school or practice or whatever else you do. How busy is your life? How often do you get a day to relax and not think about work or anything else you have going on in the next few days? Maybe not even a day. How often do you get a few hours to rest, relax, and recharge? Sleeping at night doesn’t count.

So easily we get caught up in life and that is not a bad thing necessarily. It’s not a bad thing to be busy. It could be a bad thing if you are busy all the time with no time to relax and enjoy yourself. How many times do you catch yourself saying “I don’t have enough time” or “I wish I had more time” or “I don’t have time for that”? Well, I am telling you that enough is enough. Sleep is not for the weak, it is not for retirement, and it is not for when you are dead! You need rest!

I recently got to go on a beach retreat with a group of college students from my church. We didn’t have a schedule. We didn’t have an agenda of things we needed to do. We went to the beach to retreat from our everyday lives, to rest and relax, to spend time on the beach not worrying about what we needed to get done Monday or what we were missing back home. We played card games, board games, we went and laid on the beach, we played Spike ball on the beach, we played Frisbee and other games on the beach. We had a great time.

Two of the things I enjoyed most about this retreat was the lack of schedule and the people I went with. I am a busy body. I like to stay busy, so sometimes I have to force myself not to be. I have to make myself go on retreats or not go out and just stay home for the weekend. I understand what it is like to be so caught up in everything that is going on that I forget to have some “me time”. The people I went with are awesome. We bonded over simple things like games and food. We enjoyed life together. We didn’t go on the retreat for very long, we went over Friday night and came back Sunday evening. That was a short amount of time but I had the privilege of laying on a beach and just relaxing to recharge for the next few weeks.

So this is my challenge to you: at least once a month you need to relax. Whether that means taking a day off of work and staying home in your jammies and watching movies all day, or leaving Friday night after work or school or whatever and going to the beach or the mountains or the lake and coming back Sunday evening, or just staying home all weekend and not doing anything. Whatever you decide to do, take some time to relax. And that’s an order.