I've had an interesting week since getting back from the Music Boat cruise with Third Day. It's been hard to justify that a Bahamas cruise could really be defined as work, and I've had loads of 'suffering for the gospel' jokes. Even accepting the cruise as a pleasant consequence of ministering with Third Day, I've felt a slight mix of guilt and embarrassment (only a slight!) telling people where I've been!
However, this has taken me back to my Sociology Degree ( I knew it would come in helpful eventually!), and specifically to a book by Peter Berger called A Rumour of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural in which he identifies 5 signs of life that are hard to explain without the existence of God:
-Order: all societies have an instinct for it.
-Play: it suspends the serious.
-Hope: a universal part of our experience.
-Damnation: where did the idea of death come from?
-Humor: which helps to make life tolerable.
We shouldn't feel guilty about taking time out to play, to relax, to rest. One of the organisers of the cruise said to me that in the Contemporary Christian Music industry we do a lot of business together, share in a lot of ministry together, but that the cruise was a very rare opportunity to play together.
Our lives and our spending shouldn't be dominated by a search for pleasure and play, and we should always look at ways of impacting the lives of those less fortunate than ourselves, but we needn't feel guilty at occasionally having fun and enjoying ourselves in the company of family and friends.