Decided that October would be a month of taking it easy, not standing still or anything like that, just time for catching our breath as a community. This was brought home to me on Monday as Tracy and I walked around San Antonio for about 2 hours going to various offices etc.. looking for the owner of this building we like the look of for next year. We had absolutely no joy.

Then we got to thinking "what on earth are we doing?" we've not even finished this year and we are charging into next year without so much as a pause.

We are after all part of an organisation called 24-7Prayer and there comes a time when you just need to stop and pray. So we are having no planning meetings and trying hard not to talk about next year until November. Just spending time in prayer and personal reflection.

Tracy and I are not very good at not being busy, we don't do rest well, although we recognise the need for it. We could almost be quite driven, which has it's strengths when you are trying to set something up and get something established, but it has it's weaker side when we don't stop to catch our breath.

I might try and get Tracy a laptop, so we can work up at the office rather than doing a lot of what we do at home, this will help make a clearer distinction between work and home life. All Tracy's emails and work files are on our home computer in the kitchen. We love working together, we had never done it before on a full-time basis until we got here. The downside is you can allow it to consume your conversation and talk about it all the time. So trying to introduce a work and home life separation might help, I know it won't be easy but we are going to try harder. I want a greater distinction between work and home, for the sake of my children and my marriage.

The other side to this is that we are, for want of a better phrase "a new monastic community" which means we share life together, work together, do mission together, worship together, friends together, we are a community all doing the same job. We all moved out here for this specific task off planting a community here on this island. It's great but needs rhythm and our rhythm is not so much a weekly or daily one, it's a year long one. Months of intense busy-ness followed by more chilled times, we've just got to get it right and are still finding our feet with it.

I love that line from The Prodigy "breath the pressure"

Got to learn to breath better.

Any suggestions?