Concluding Report

This sabbatical has been, above all, an education in wholeness. For so long I have lived in the left brain — the ordered, analytical, administrative mind that ministry demands — and I have loved that work. But this season has invited me, gently and persistently, into the right brain too: into beauty, creativity, rest, and the quiet intuition of the spirit. The two halves are not enemies. They are one mind, made whole.

I gathered with the people of God in sanctuaries across Ontario and beyond — Catholic and Protestant, liturgical and free, ancient and new. Each tradition taught me something the others could not. The Catholic Church taught me reverence for mystery, and, most movingly, a profound reverence for the Eucharist — a sacrament treated there with a hush and a holiness that arrested me. It reminded me that we, in the Protestant faith, should begin to honour this sacrament much more — to meet the Lord's Table not as a familiar rite, but as the sacred mystery it truly is; the Salvation Army taught me the dignity of every human face; the Christian Science Church, while immaculate and well worth seeing, taught me the importance of knowing truth and scripture so that one may not be led astray with crafty and cunning words that seem sound but are not. Worship, I learned again, is not a thing we produce. It is a thing we enter.

This journey strengthened my faith precisely through the courage of exploring other faith practices — allowing them to challenge my spiritual growth rather than threaten it. My visit to Christian Science, in particular, correlated with a question I carried all season: the healing of the body through faith and spiritual practice. I did not adopt what I encountered, but I let it ask me hard questions, and I came away the firmer for it. Sometimes learning other methods and belief systems is the very thing that helps us evaluate our own to a finer degree.

There was, too, a quieter grace in this season: for once, I worshipped on Sundays instead of leading. I sat in the pews of Connexus Church with my family, explored the music of unfamiliar worship settings, and let someone else carry the service. To be led, rather than to lead, was a gift I had not known I needed — a Sabbath within the Sabbath, where I could simply receive.

I read, studied, and lingered over books and ideas. Education in this season was not the acquisition of credentials but the slow nourishment of a hungry mind — letting great thoughts settle, letting questions remain unanswered, letting curiosity lead where it would. A rested mind, I discovered, learns differently: more slowly, more deeply, more joyfully.

I will be honest: I did not read all the books I had set out to read in this short time. But I did enjoy many, many Bible study videos through RightNow Media — letting teachers and scholars feed my spirit when my eyes grew tired of the page. The stack of books I wish to read still waits for me, and I will continue to plug away at it. Sabbatical did not finish the reading. It renewed the love of it.

I explored right-brain activity through the visual arts — wandering galleries in Boston and across Ontario, lingering before centuries of devotional painting, and then, most unexpectedly, creating art in my own backyard. There is a particular grace in moving from looking at beauty to making it: setting up a folding table on the patio, laying down colour with a spray can and a brush, and letting the hands be busy while the mind is free. Beauty became a practice, not a luxury — and art, like prayer, I learned, is simply the practice of paying close attention.

Health and beauty, in this season, came to mean both exercise and healing — two threads I had long held apart that sabbatical wove together. I cared for the body as an act of stewardship: movement, rest, and the small rituals of self-care. I attended several physiotherapy sessions, and I visited the menopause clinic at Sinai Health, seeking care for the body at this particular threshold of life. I exercised, and I found both healing and a deepening body awareness through my yoga practice — learning, slowly, to listen to the body rather than push past it. I treated myself, too, to the gifts of restorative care — three facials, manicures, and massage therapy sessions — and to red light therapy, both at home and at the health club. Each small ritual was a way of saying to the body: you have carried me far, and you deserve to be tended.

And here I found a joy I did not expect: creating my own skincare products with beef tallow. There is something quietly satisfying in taking a simple, God-given ingredient and working it by hand into something that nourishes the skin. It is, in truth, an art — the same patient blending of knowledge, intuition, and care that any craft demands. I will continue to find joy in this. Tenderness toward the body, I discovered, is not vanity but gratitude — a way of honouring the vessel that carries us through every sacred and ordinary day.

Food, too, became part of this same wholeness. I shared tables with the people I love. Meals became altars of a kind — places where time slowed, where conversation deepened, where the simple act of breaking bread together carried the weight of communion. Sabbatical taught me that to eat slowly, in good company, is itself a form of prayer.

I had hoped, too, to create new recipes and record them here — to let this season become a small archive of the kitchen's quiet experiments. I did not achieve as many as I would have liked. But this section is not finished; it is only begun. I will continue to expand on it in the future, adding to it as the seasons turn and the table grows.

After reading Bessel van der Kolk's "The Body Keeps the Score," I took its invitation seriously and explored trauma healing through breath work, a deepened yoga practice, and other forms of therapy. I am grateful for each of them — they offered real tools, real steadiness, real relief. And yet, in honesty, every one of them fell short of the healing and wholeness I experience through my faith in Jesus. They tended the body and the nervous system; Christ tends the whole person. This was not a dismissal of the practices but a clarification of my hope: that the deepest healing I know still comes by way of the Cross, and that the therapies, at their best, are signposts pointing toward a wholeness only God can finally give.

Even in rest, the sacred work continued to find me — at hospital bedsides, in funeral homes, in the interview room for a new church secretary, in the closing service of a congregation I had walked with for three years. I joined in the life of the wider church community, too, lending my presence to its fundraisers — the chicken BBQ at Mayfield United Church and the S.H.A.R.E. golf tournament — where fellowship and faithful labour mingle over smoke and fairways. And I continued the quieter work: pastoral care calls and visits to those in need within our own congregation — a listening ear, a prayer offered, a presence that says you are not alone.

Ministry, distilled to its essence, is presence. It is the steady faithfulness of showing up. That much did not change. What changed was me — more rested, more whole, more able to give from a replenished well.

If I were to name what this sabbatical has given me in a single word, it would be wholeness — a wholeness tested and refined, not assumed. The left brain and the right, the analytical and the imaginative, the active and the contemplative — these are not opposing lives but one life, held together by a love deeper than any season. All these experiences — the other faith practices, the therapies, the art, the tallow, the sanctuaries of every tradition — strengthened the Biblical truths I hold firm to, not by shielding them from challenge, but by letting them be challenged. Sometimes learning other methods and belief systems is the very grace that helps us evaluate our own to a finer degree, and find them, finally, more true.

And at the centre of it all stands the Cross. My deepest appreciation this season is for the work of Jesus on the cross — the finished work by which grace flows freely, keeping me, and all of us, in right relationship with God. Not by effort, not by achievement, but by grace through the work of Jesus. The Eucharist, which I learned anew to honour as the sacred mystery it truly is, became for me a weekly resting in that grace — a receiving of the body and blood given for us. My faith in Jesus has strengthened throughout this sabbatical — deepened, tested, and found more true than ever.

I return to ministry not as one leaving rest behind, but as one carrying it forward: a quieter mind, a fuller heart, and a renewed conviction that the God who called me into this sacred work is the same God who, in mercy, called me into this sacred rest. To Him be the glory.