Summer Slowdown

In this issue I am doing something a little different.

Each week I love serving leaders who are motivated by their faith to lead by design. We are all on this journey together. One of the core principles I share with clients is that you never graduate from the school of self awareness and self development.

More importantly, you never graduate from the school of sanctification. We are either actively growing in Godliness, or we are drifting.

These last few weeks I felt a deep check in my spirit to intentionally slow down, rest, recalibrate, and recreate.

Interestingly, the word recreation comes directly from the Latin root recreare, which literally means to create anew, to restore, to refresh, or to bring back to life.

In our modern culture, we tend to view recreation as an escape from reality. We use it for entertainment, numbing, endless scrolling, and digital binging just to recover from another grueling week of work.

But biblical recreation is about restoration for reality.

It is an intentional pause that allows the Holy Spirit to renew your mind, body, and spirit so you can step back into your God given calling with fresh strength and renewed clarity. True rest does not empty your tank. It refills it.

Jesus modeled this perfectly. He regularly stepped away from the pressing crowds, the relentless demands of ministry, and the urgent needs of pastoral care to retreat to desolate places. He went there to pray, to rest, and to feast with His disciples.

He was actively practicing recreation, allowing His human frame to be fully restored in the presence of the Father.

From the Kitchen Basket: A Summer Pivot

I am almost always juggling multiple books at the exact same time. I rarely read them straight through from beginning to end. Instead, I treat my reading like a living library of resources I can draw from to build my understanding and expand my toolkit for living and leading by design.

We actually have a dedicated wicker basket in our kitchen that is completely jammed with a rotating mix of leadership frameworks, biblical commentaries, and business strategies. It is constantly overflowing, and my wife is always asking why in the world I need all these books right in the middle of the kitchen.

I almost exclusively read non fiction. I love it because it is functional, tactical, and I can directly apply it to the projects, organizations, and executive coaching clients I am serving in real time.

However, as we challenged our kids to put down the screens and read some literary classics this summer, I felt a strong conviction to change my own reading rhythm as well.

The analytical executive brain needs practical frameworks, but the soul needs beauty, poetry, and imagination to survive.

Since I have recently found myself binge watching lectures, sermons, and interviews with the poet, priest, and scholar Malcolm Guite, it just made absolute sense to order his new book and step into a different kind of reading.

Galahad and the Grail

From the book: Check it out at https://www.rabbitroom.com/merlinsisle

A Prophetic Word at Dover Castle

Reading Guite naturally sparked a deep reflection on my own relationship with the written word.

For as long as I can remember, I have felt a persistent, quiet pull toward writing. If you searched my home, you would find physical stacks of old notebooks filled with poetry, song lyrics from my early days of playing in bands, drafted sermons, and unpolished leadership ideas.

A few years ago I streamlined my process and switched over to Apple Notes. I now keep an ongoing annual ledger of quotes, observations, and creative sparks.

Very slowly, in the quiet spaces between work, family, executive coaching sessions and client projects, I have been chipping away at the manuscript for my first book draft, titled Live by Design.

Stepping back into that creative space this summer brought a vivid memory flooding back to my mind.

Several years ago, I took a life altering trip to England with a global collective of leaders hailing from South Africa, Bulgaria, the United States, and around the world.

It was one of those rare travel experiences where your internal perspective is permanently shifted and your worldview is beautifully widened. As the famous proverb attributed to the theologian Saint Augustine of Hippo reminds us, the world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.

While we were walking and talking along the ancient, windswept stone walls of Dover Castle, a good friend turned to me and delivered a deeply encouraging word.

He looked at me and said, “I see your writing, your words, impacting thousands of people.”

At the time, I was not remotely serious about authoring a book. I loved writing music, and I was just beginning to learn the architecture of crafting a sermon, but his words landed with a profound, prophetic weight. They planted a seed that has remained buried in my soil ever since.

This commitment to summer recreation and slowing down opened up a creative well that has been capped for a very long time.

Just this week, for the first time in years, I sat down in the quiet and wrote a short poem.

I am certainly not trying to present myself as a professional poet, but these lines simply poured out of me in one single sitting. It captures the raw, honest tension between our human desire for predictable control and the daily surrender required in true leadership.

Here is what came out of that quiet moment.

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Lord!

Why the restlessness!?

Disillusion!

Divided!

Unstable!

Ahhh…. Remind me

Double minded.

Waves crash.

Winds blow.

I’m the “to and fro”

I know the songs

The ancient truths of old

Ahhh… Knowing you say

The devil knows

The question is

Are you submitted though?

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I am sharing this poem with you today because I am right there in the middle of it.

I know what it feels like to battle a constant, lingering restlessness.

I know the heavy ache of disillusionment when the reality of leadership does not match the clean equations we built in our heads.

As leaders, we feel an immense pressure to project complete certainty, especially when our teams and our families are looking to us for direction.

But the truth is, I get caught in that exact tension all the time.

I constantly wrestle between wanting a predictable formula where I obey and it goes my way, and actually choosing the quiet, difficult posture of surrender.

My hope is that by sharing my own restlessness and disillusionment, it gives every pastor, executive, and business owner reading these words permission to pause.

You do not have to carry the illusion of absolute control.

Dylan