Last weekend Kay and I got out of town -
we booked a room at an inn on the Maine coast and spent the weekend, just the two of us,
  walking and taking naps, getting up to watch the sun rise, eating good food...
It was, to be perfectly honest, wonderful to wake up on Sunday morning and think: no church today!
There were several nice-looking churches nearby; we didn't go.
Instead, we hiked up a nearby mountain - 
well, the locals call it a mountain - it's really a modest rise in the landscape -
  but it was a beautiful, sunny morning, and from the top, you could see a long way.
That was Sabbath enough for us.

Five years ago, soon after you invited me to become the next minister of The First Parish,
   the Personnel Committee gave me these instructions:
  once every three months during the church year, go away for the weekend -
take Kay and get out of town...  we'll take care of the Sunday service.
We have been grateful for the wisdom of those instructions many times over,
because they give us official permission to take care of ourselves -
  something all of us, of course, intend to do...
   except that most of us don't.
We all need a wise Personnel Committee to instruct us, order us, to take care of ourselves.

It is an enormous privilege to live where we do -- we all know this.
For our part, Kay and I love living in the parsonage.
I love being one of the ministers of this church.
She loves her work as part of a groundbreaking project under the BU School of Public Health.
We both imagine ourselves someday looking back on these years as the best years of our lives.
But, these years have also been very challenging years for our marriage,
and we aren't even raising children, like so many of you.

Don't worry about us - we're fine: I think we're more in love with each other than ever.
But the challenge is there - and I bring it up because I think it's one we all face
   whether we're married or single, young, old, or somewhere in between:
  we are part of a community with high standards and high expectations -
we want to do our part as a stakeholder in our town, our schools, our church,
  and all sorts of worthwhile community projects,
   and we also set high standards for ourselves at work and at home.
You, the people of this parish, really do step up to the plate in lots of significant ways.
And, most of us have felt, sooner or later, the burden of all these worthy claims on our time -
they are a challenge to our balance, we can begin to feel out of touch with of our center,
  to lose sight of our loved ones, and we wonder what to do.

In his book, Time and the Soul, Jacob Needleman writes:
"It is this life that I wish to live, the same life I am living, but with one great difference:
  a difference in my experience of time...  the fact is that I am not now living my life -
   it is living me."