The Difference Between Quitting, Changing & Taking a Break

My friend Jon Swanson writes.

He writes a lot.

Books, articles, blog posts, sermons, and much more that I don’t even know about.

300 words a day is his blog that I subscribe to and is part of my morning routine when I wake up, it’s waiting for my in my email.

Wednesday was different however.  There was no 300 words a day update.  I knew that when I read his Tuesday update.

Jon is taking a break.

His life is busy.

My life is busy.

So is yours.

Somehow we manage to fill every 24 hours that God gives us daily.

We decide how to spend the time He gives us.

Juggling priorities is part of life.

I used to be on a quest to see how much I could do.

A dozen years ago I knew a few Fort Wayne area friends who started posting online with their own blogs and then they would quit.   I used to think of them as quitters.

But then a few years ago I was challenged to make a change in my online writing and instead of having multiple ScLoHo blogs, to create an identity for my given name, Scott Howard online.  In 2011 I launched this website after posting thousands of articles on the other blogs.

This was a change, not a quit.

I am consistently changing this website too.  The style, the format, the content gets revamped regularly.  Change can be good both online and in our off line lives.

Taking a break is what my friend Jon is doing.  We all need to take a break at times.  Recently my step-daughter and her husband came in from out of town and spent a week with us.  Part of that week was a 2 1/2 day break from their two young boys ages 5 months and 18 months, to go to a wedding.  My wife and I took care of the boys that weekend and gained an appreciation for our kids who are parents of young ones 24/7.  It has been a couple decades since mine were that small and dependent on Mom & Dad.

A week ago today, I took a break for several hours with my WOWO Radio Sales Team co-workers as we started the morning on a golf course followed by a wonderful lunch to kick off the Labor Day weekend.   This weekend I’ll be gone on a retreat.

The retreat is similar to one I attended last spring, except this time, I’m one of the two leaders organizing and running the program so it’s not so much a purely get-away retreat as the one earlier this year.

When you decide to stop doing something, reflect on if you are simply taking a break and will return, simply making a change, or quitting all together.  It will make the decision to take action easier, if you know the answer.