Resting - on Waiheke and at home

Over ANZAC weekend Martin and I spent four nights camping at Poukaraka Flats on Waiheke Island.  It's a fairly basic Auckland Council campground in the Regional Park there, although less basic than some - there are flush toilets, and the showers are set up so the water reservoirs heat up nicely on a sunny day.  The showers also have open ceilings and are located next to some tall trees: it's quite lovely to look up into leaves and a brilliant blue sky :-)

We stayed at the same campground over ANZAC weekend last year.  Knowing the place a bit did make the break especially restful - I wasn't so interested in making sure I saw the various interesting things in the area, meaning I spent most of the time just resting.

Here we are about to get going.  Most of the kit's on Martin's bike, with just a few bits and pieces on mine.

Here are the bikes after visiting Waiheke Island's Countdown: my bike's a bit more laden, now that we have four night's groceries added to the mix.

I'd made really good time getting to the supermarket.  We'd biked to the local train station, caught the train into town and then the ferry across to Waiheke.  Last year it took me about an hour to get from the ferry at Matiatia to the supermarket in Ostend; this time it was 45 minutes :-)  However, after that things didn't go so well.  Waiheke's pretty hilly, and at the beginning of the last hill I ran out of oomph.  I've been working very hard recently, and I think I was just too tired - especially with the extra weight of groceries.

Fortunately, where I ran out of energy was by the beach right next to the beach where we'd be camping.  Martin suggested I leave my bike at the carpark and walk around the headland, and he'd bike his bike up and over then nip around the headland for my bike and bike that up and over as well.  In the end, I decided to take a somewhat longer route and walk over the headland that divides the two beaches - it was a hot day and I wanted some cover, plus it's always nice to be in the bush.  I took it pretty slowly and ended up at the campsite at exactly the same time as Martin rolled up on my bike - about an hour after we'd left the supermarket, the same time as it'd taken me to bike last year :-)

It's a glorious place to be: above is the view looking back towards the campsite from the beach at low tide.

At the right in the photo below is the headland I walked over to get to the campsite.  It's an old pa site, with lots of kumara pits.

Martin serving up dinner.  These council campsites always seem to have enough picnic tables for anyone who wants to to commandeer one, which is awfully handy.  Our tent is big enough to sleep in, but doesn't really have space for much stuff, so we kept all our groceries and other bits and pieces on the table the whole time.  Behind Martin you can see there's just a thin band of trees (which made a very effective shelter-belt) and then the sea.  It was lovely to go to sleep to the wash of the waves high on the beach :-)

Our setup.  You can see the picnic table and tent.  We kept a bike at each end of the table the whole time, which meant we could cover the table with a tarp at night or when it rained and the tarp stayed reasonably well above the stuff.  It rained a few times while we were there, but not enough to be really troublesome.

The view looking out from the beach at low tide.  You probably can't pick it in the photo, but w could see the Sky Tower slightly to the left of the small island that's roughly in the middle of the photo.  There were many brief rain showers during our stay, and Martin spent a lot of time looking out at this view watching the various bands of cloud roll in - they moved remarkably quickly!

It was so good to take time to rest.  We did one bush walk, had a couple of swims on the finest day, and listened to a 5-ish hour audio book together.  Twice Martin picked cockles for our meals :-) Other than that, I spent an awful lot of time dozing, and didn't do much else other than sit in various places watching birds.  It was so good to just 'be'.

It wasn't the cheapest of holidays, at $275 for four nights, but not too bad.  Also not too bad from a greenhouse gas point of view, being responsible for around 70kg CO2e (what the planet can absorb per person in about three weeks).  And it was so good for us both.

At home, I often find it difficult to truly rest; although I still spend much of my day lying down, I'm most often both playing Solitaire and listening to something.  But on this break I found myself quite content to just do nothing.  I've been trying to practise more of that at home, too, in the week or so that we've been back - and twice in recent days that's led to me falling asleep in the afternoon - so good :-)

Today has been my weekly Sabbath.  I'm so grateful to God for the rhythm of the week, and for every week having a day to rest and to be with God and to do the things I feel like doing.  This morning I spent time reflecting on Isaiah 30:15:

For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel:
In returning and rest you shall be saved;
    in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.

It comes at a time when God is trying to call the people of Israel back to him, but they're not interested.  And yet, reading those words, I'm so interested!  Being with God, rest, quietness, trust - these are the things I so often find myself longing for.

So, I thank God for the regular rhythm of weekly rest, and for regular patches of quiet in the day.  I pray for deep rest.  But, I also pray for the simplicity of purpose that I hope comes from spending time with God.  Because the other thing I was reflecting on this morning was the fleetingness of life.  I was reading these words sitting under our oak tree.  The leaves were falling - each of them has come to the end of its existence as a leaf.  Ants were crawling over me, and I killed one of them as I flicked it off my leg.  More significantly, someone we care about a lot from our church is dying - and, although he's lived a long life, it still feels like his life is being cut short as he's so actively living and growing right now.  And so I pray, in the short time that I will live, that I won't be consumed with busyness but that I will live out of a still, quiet core - that trust in God will be my strength and my guide, day to day.