Holidays
The long summer with its associated summer school holiday for children is drawing to an end this week.
Many parents and perhaps even grandparents will be glad to think that normality of our work routines will set in again, and children will be reined back in to doing some useful learning.
No doubt September will perhaps bring some fine weather in line with the ‘Indian summers’ we have recently been getting used to in this early autumn season.
The word ‘holiday’ contains an ancient truth. In the past people did not have weeks at a time away from work, but they had a certain very limited number of saints days (‘holy’ days) in the year, during which it was customary not to come to work, but to attend and participate in the religious (and sometimes not quite so religious) activities of the day.
Whether we go away for traditional holidays or whether we don’t, it is important to change the pattern of our lives occasionally, even if it is only for a day.
This can help us to re-focus on what is really essential, and what is merely a rat-race and peripheral. It is good sometimes to ‘have nothing planned for the day’, so that we can feel the emptiness in our lives which God longs to fill with his holy presence.
Bernhard Schunemann
31 August 2025
