On January 1, per our annual family New Year’s tradition, we drove north to stay at a hotel by the beach for a night.
We’re on our fifth year of these mini family getaways. We used to stay at the Blue Lantern Inn, a cute bed & breakfast that looks out onto Baby Beach in Dana Point. One of the key selling points is that they coffee to your room in the morning, but with three kids now, we’ve since outgrown it. Now we stay at a hotel in Huntington Beach that is both pet-friendly and kid-friendly. The room we book has a huge bathtub and a pull-out bed that all the kids, in theory, can sleep on, and the hotel offers a triple threat of treats – wine hour, complimentary cold brew, and unlimited s’mores.
The intention in past years was to use this time to dream and pray over goals as a family, but that’s hard to do with three kids five and under. Now, Dave and I pre-game the dreaming and goal-planning with our own retreat sometime in the fall, and use the annual new year’s getaway to rest and play.
This year, after check-in, we went to happy hour on the pier. There were hundreds of people out, taking pictures and selfies, trying to capture the unreal sunset that night – all the shades of orange, purple, and blue – the first sunset of the new decade. We went back to the hotel for wine and s’mores and sitting around the firepit. The boys watched Home Alone on the pull-out bed. I brought a special bath bomb for their bath, and with the blessing of blackout curtains, my husband and boys slept in until past 9 a.m. I used the quiet time for something as life-giving for me as sleep: journaling, goal-setting, Bible-reading, and prayer. And when the baby woke up, the two of us headed downstairs to pick up hot chocolate so thick it was almost ganache, with homemade caramel and chocolate chip marshmallows, and nitro cold brew with cream. Breakfast was longanisa sausage and pancakes with butter-crisped edges topped with berries and vanilla butter and macadamia nuts. Then more beach time, us sprawled out on hotel towels, me with a book and the boys with sand toys, all blue skies and soft, sea breeze and grounding sand.
Now that we’re home, our boys say, out of the blue, “Remember the hotel? That was fun.” They say, “Remember the hot chocolate?” or “Remembering when we watched the movie and ate french fries?”
They remember. We remember. We remember what it feels like to celebrate and sleep in and savor all of our favorite foods. We remember how to be present and intentional and unrushed, how fun it is to be a family. We remember how to exercise contentment for where we are at this exact moment in this new year.
Our new year’s retreat was not officially Sabbath, but it captured the ethos of it: “a day to pamper your soul in God’s presence.” (John Mark Comer – Sabbath).
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I set 8 goals this year, and the first one is this: to practice Sabbath, every week for all 52 weeks of this year.
For the last few weeks, we’ve been calibrating and experimenting with what it looks like for our family to set apart a day that is restful and worshipful, a day that shows gratitude for the week behind and celebration for the week ahead.
The questions that we keep coming back to are: What’s life-giving? What does self-care and soul-care look like in this season? What actually feels restorative? How do we model the rhythms of rest and work to our kids? How do we stay present? How do we follow the lifestyle of Jesus in 2020?
We’re learning new rhythms and building on family traditions. I don’t have all the answers to those questions, but we’re starting with Sabbath.