Epiphanies Need Margin
I’m going on sabbatical this summer. Three months. After thirty-one years at the same church, I’m taking a long pause.
The strange thing about announcing a sabbatical to other pastors is how many of them lean in and lower their voices. I don’t know how you’re going to be gone that long. I couldn’t do it. I totally get it. It feels scary in my good moments, and irresponsible in my bad ones.
I think we’ve lost something that has some theological weight for us to ponder.
The line that’s been following me around
A.J. Swoboda and Nijay Gupta wrote a book called Slow Theology that I picked up last year and bought for all our pastors as a Christmas gift. Most of it is what you’d expect from two thoughtful theologians writing about Sabbath and pace and formation. But one sentence has been following me around the house:
Apparently, epiphanies need margin.
They make the case from Scripture, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Moses meets God at the burning bush while tending sheep in the back side of Midian. Elijah hears the still small voice after he runs from Jezebel into the wilderness. David writes his most honest psalms while hiding in caves. Paul takes the long and arduous 20-mile walk to Miletus instead of hopping in the boat with his companions. I think the walk was where God solidified Paul’s resolve to meet his final opposition in Jerusalem.
John writes Revelation while exiled to a rock in the Aegean Sea called Patmos. Pause on that last one. Patmos wasn’t a writer’s retreat. It was a Roman prison colony. The empire stuck John on an island because they wanted him out of the way. And while he was out of the way, heaven opened up. And the very thing the empire used to shelve John was the same thing God used to give him the appropriately titled, “Revelation”?
A quick word about the noise
I know what some of you are thinking, because I’ve seen the same X threads you have. There’s a loud corner of the internet right now where a certain kind of pastor is rolling his eyes at the idea of sabbatical. Soft. Coddled. Pastoral wimpery. Paul didn’t take a sabbatical. Get back to work. The takes get sharper the further you scroll.
I want to say two things about that.
One: I get the concern underneath it. There’s a version of “self-care” that has become an excuse to coast, to disengage, to baptize selfishness with spiritual language. That version deserves the pushback. Ministry is hard, and it’s supposed to cost you something. Anyone who’s read 2 Corinthians 11 knows Paul wasn’t running a wellness retreat.
Two: that’s not what we’re talking about. Sabbath isn’t a Western indulgence. It’s the fourth commandment. The rhythm of rest is woven into the creation account before sin enters the picture, which means it isn’t a concession to weakness. It’s a feature of being a creature. The God who didn’t need to rest rested anyway, on purpose, as a pattern for the people He was making.
Jesus built in consistent rhythms of rest. And the same Paul, those threads love to quote, spent three years in Arabia after his conversion before he started his public ministry. And he took the slow walk to Miletus to meet with God and remove himself from the noise.
So I’m not interested in joining the dunk contest in either direction. I’m interested in what actually forms a leader over the long haul. The internet rewards hot takes. The Kingdom rewards the long obedience. I want the latter.
The problem with how we lead
Many church leaders are running at a pace that doesn’t leave room for an epiphany. We’ve absorbed an unspoken assumption: the busier I look, the more faithful I must be. We measure ourselves by the same metrics that exhaust us. Calendar density. Email volume. Hours logged.
And then we wonder why our sermons feel thinner than they used to. Why our prayer life shows up only as a half-hearted whisper between meetings. Why we can quote Brené Brown and Tim Keller but we haven’t heard God say anything to us personally in a while.
The desert fathers had a practice they called statio. Stopping between one thing and the next. Just to tap into presence. They’d literally pause at the door of a room before entering it, so they didn’t carry the chaos of the last conversation into the next one. They knew that the soul moves at a slower speed than the schedule.
The leaky bucket
Wayne Cordeiro has this picture I love. He says every one of us has an emotional and spiritual bucket. There are spigots at the top, things that fill us up: time in Scripture, time with people who get us, hobbies that have nothing to do with our job, sleep, exercise. I know for me, long car rides with loud music, a book and a cigar on the back deck, a long and deep conversation with a couple of intelligent guys, those things fill my bucket.
But every bucket also has holes. Unresolved conflict drains it. Over-scheduled weeks drain it. The slow drip of sin we haven’t dealt with drains it. The conversations we keep avoiding drain it.
Most pastors I know are burned out because the leaky holes are outpacing the spigots, and getting serious about refilling, they keep reaching for productivity hacks.
There are some universal warning signs that your bucket is emptying:
- Irritability. Small things provoke big reactions. The slow driver. The volunteer who flakes again. The spouse who asks an innocent question.
- Loss of impulse control. Overspending. Overeating. Over-medicating. Anything that gives you a five-minute high.
- Escape behavior. Endless scrolling. Pornography. A second drink that becomes a third. The Netflix binge that crowds out the things you say you care about.
- Eventually, collapse. A breakdown. An anxiety attack. A moral failure that didn’t come out of nowhere.
What John knew on Patmos
Here’s what I’m thinking about as I prepare for sabbatical. John didn’t go to Patmos looking for Revelation. He went because Rome put him there. But once he was there, he slowed down, he was stripped of the daily work of ministry, and he had ears to hear what he couldn’t hear at full speed. I wonder how much we miss because of the pace of things.
I’m not saying every leader needs a three-month sabbatical to hear from God. That’s a privilege I don’t take for granted. But I am saying this: if you’re leading at a pace that has zero margin for the Spirit to interrupt you, you are functionally telling God you don’t need an epiphany. You’ve got it from here. That’s not faithfulness.
What to do this week
I would offer you two questions and one action.
Question one: How is your spiritual bucket right now? Make two lists. What fills you. What drains you. Be honest. Don’t write what should fill you. Write what actually does. And here’s the goal. It’s not to eliminate the drains. A lot of ministry is draining. That’s called having a job. The goal is to offset the things that are draining you with streams of replenishment.
Often, we think we’re too busy with the things that drain our bucket, so we stop making time for the things that fill it. This is suicide because before you know it, your bucket will be empty and you’ll find yourself in that downward spiral of exhaustion and soul sickness.
Question two: Where in your week is there any margin at all? Real margin. A walk with nothing on the other end. A morning when the phone stays in the other room. A drive you take the long way on purpose.
The action: This week, build one block of margin into your calendar. Defend it. Treat it the way you’d treat a board meeting. If someone asks what’s on your calendar from 7 to 9 on Thursday morning, the answer is: I have a meeting. You do. The meeting is with God. He doesn’t generally show up when you’re triple-booked.
When I return from sabbatical, I’ll be sure to share some learnings with you. But I already know the headline… Apparently, epiphanies need margin.
