I remember a youth rally a couple of decades ago when I instructed a pastor new to youth ministry, saying, “You don’t get much sleep at a rally. You need to be the last one in bed and the first one up. Rallies are pretty exhausting for me, but I love camping. At camp, the kids all have more energy than I do for the first couple of days, but after Wednesday, I always have more energy than them. It is a matter of endurance. I and take more days of short sleep than they can.”

I believed my advice. I used to be sure that I knew where the youth and their advisors were before I crawled into my bed, and I would be up to ring the get-up bell in the morning. I showered while the youth were still sleeping. I kept up that pace for a long career.

Now, however, I no longer have the energy to be the last to bed and the first to rise. The extra long days take quite a bit out of me. I often have to allow a day or more to recover after a short period when I sleep less. I’m pretty aware of my limits as I write. Yesterday was a long day. On Monday, I flew to Cleveland - three time zones to the east - and came home yesterday. I rose for a full day of meetings in Cleveland, made it to the airport to catch a 5:30 flight, got into Seattle at 8 pm for a three-hour layover before catching a flight that brought me back to Bellingham just before midnight. Traveling through the time zones made it easy to add three hours to my day on a day when I had a lot of work to accomplish before I started to travel.

Usually, I go to bed and sleep a few hours before I write my journal, but tonight, I’m publishing it before I crawl into bed. I’ll try to get as much uninterrupted sleep as possible before having to rise tomorrow. Fortunately, I have had time to write this entry as I traveled. I may have acquired a modicum of wisdom from experience and haven’t scheduled any meetings or other activities today. I’ll likely sleep a bit later before getting up and dealing with the chores put on the back burner during the three days I have been gone this week.

My reduced energy for travel is just one of many signs of aging. I am not as young as I once was. I am not as young as I sometimes think I am. When I scheduled travel for this week’s meetings, it seemed like a good idea to travel after a full day’s work. It seemed like an efficient use of time. However, it is possible that it is not efficient. Since today will be a day of low productivity following the long day yesterday, I might not be able to accomplish anything more than if I had delayed my travel until today.

Had I scheduled travel for today, it would still seem like a long day simply because making the trip home from Cleveland means rising on Eastern Daylight Time and going to bed on Mountain Daylight time. No matter how much I plan, flying adds three hours to the day of travel.

I have long believed that many things are worse than missing a little bit of sleep. Even in my seventies, I can easily catch up on my sleep. Many interesting things beckon me from the bed and remind me that there will be time for sleeping later. Still, as I wind down from a very long day, sleep is inviting.

As I age, I will continue to be less resilient and slower to recover from long days of business and travel. However, I feel fortunate to be able to do what is important to me and to engage in meaningful work.

Yesterday, a colleague and I were reflecting on some of the ups and downs of our involvement in the national setting of our church over the past three decades. We have a shared passion for ministries with children and have been advocates for educational and faith formation ministries for a long time. We have seen staff members come and go. We have seen budgets built and revised. We have had some joyous successes and more than a few failures. We have worked together on curriculum development projects. We have been colleague writers on some projects. At one point, I was her editor as we produced resources for the church's educational ministries. We have a long history of working together, and this project is the kind of work about which we have shared passion. We also have learned how to divide tasks and get work done. This week, however, it has also been good for us to be the elders in the room as younger colleagues participate in the work and glimpse our passion for what we do. I don’t know if we provided any inspiration for our younger colleagues. Still, we demonstrated how we have made lifetime commitments to educational ministries and how we see these ministries as sacred work worthy of passing on to future generations. It feels good to be in the role of an elder but still be engaged in the work.

I left the meeting with a list of tasks to complete. I expected to do so. Some of them will be easy for me. Others will take more time and energy. I am pleased to be able to have a role in moving our church forward. There have been some days since I retired when I lost sight of my role in the church. I know that I am no longer a local church pastor who leads worship each week and provides pastoral care to the members of my congregation. I still miss that work, however. It was good work and meaningful work. Working on a task that contributes to the church's future is good.

However, tonight, my job is to get some sleep. Tomorrow, I will rise to a new day with new adventures and, as always, plenty of work to do.