My vacation ended four days ago, and I'm adjusting to normal weekly rhythms again. Getting back into "real life" in Amsterdam has been good -- but also exhausting. Maintaining a house again, paying bills, responding to a backlog of e-mails, getting caught up on ministry relationships and responsibilities, resuming healthier patterns of eating and exercising, riding my bike in the rain again... I see it all as good and necessary activity, but it's been tiring me out.

Even so, I've recently been appreciating the way that exhaustion (particularly in the immediate transition back from a time of great refreshment) is significantly better than discouragement.

Looking at the calendar this morning, I felt shocked to realize that we're already down to the last week of August! This was a very pleasant realization for me -- because, ever since moving to Amsterdam, August has been the time of year when I go through a period of feeling like a complete and utter failure. Amsterdam feels like a ghost-town to me, when so many friends are gone on vacation. Ministry loses all its momentum. I find myself feeling idle, if I try to keep up my normal routines through the summer vacation season. The days start getting noticeably shorter again, two months after the high point of the summer solstice, and (yes, even in August) my thoughts turn towards winter. I find myself asking all these existential questions and getting depressed, when I consider my life and ministry in Amsterdam, in the month of August... And I wallow in feelings of emptiness and failure.

Fortunately, it's usually just a seasonal thing. But even more fortunately, the planning of our family vacation for this year made it so that I practically skipped the entire month of August! We didn't necessarily plan it that way, but it's worked out wonderfully! Of course, we've been here for a week at the beginning and the end of the month; but prior to vacation, it was all busy activity and preparing to head out of town, and since returning from vacation it's been the warm afterglow of vacation rapidly blending into all busy activity and getting caught up on everything that I missed while out of town. I just haven't had the opportunity to do any wallowing in feelings of emptiness and failure! And I view that as a special reminder of God's grace and goodness to me.

So anyway, I share that just to encourage anyone who may not have had the privilege of taking a vacation this month and thus find himself or herself suffering from some version of the Agonies of August (Take heart: Realize that the end of the month is just around the corner!). And now I'd better be getting back to work...