A missionary family vacation was never something we talked about growing up in ministry. You gave. You served. You stayed. Taking a week off felt like abandoning the people who depended on us — and honestly, it felt like a small betrayal of the calling itself.
In this article
Who I am, and why we nearly stayed home
My name is Grant Haynes. I have been a support-raising missionary for nearly thirty years, and I still am. My wife and I raised our children on the field — fourteen years in Oaxaca, Mexico, where all three of them were born, and the years since among refugees in Clarkston, Georgia. Rental houses, borrowed furniture, plans that changed. We learned to hold things loosely: possessions, schedules, comfort.
What we did not learn quickly enough was how to hold ourselves loosely. How to release the grip on constant productivity. How to let someone else carry the weight for a week while we sat still somewhere and breathed.
Years ago we had the chance to travel as a family. A real trip — not a conference, not a mission visit, not a home-assignment deputation run. An actual missionary family vacation. And we very nearly talked ourselves out of it before we started packing.
The reasons not to go were loud, and I suspect you already know most of them. The money was not set aside. Our supporters gave for ministry, not for beaches. What would people think? Could we really justify it? I have gone roughly twenty years without a sabbatical, so I can tell you the internal argument does not get quieter with time. It gets more practiced. And the exhaustion of running that argument on a loop is itself one of the clearest signs that rest is overdue.
We went.
Rest is part of the calling too
A practical guide to planning time away that actually restores you: where to go, what it costs, and how to come back different.
What a real missionary family vacation revealed about us
We chose the Mexican coast. Not for any deeply spiritual reason — it was beautiful, it was close to where we were serving, and we loved the Pacific.
The first days were the hardest, and that is worth saying plainly, because nobody warns you about it. A depleted person does not arrive somewhere lovely and immediately relax. You arrive still braced. You check your phone. You compose emails in your head. You sit in front of an ocean and feel guilty for being in front of it. If that has been your experience of the first two days of a holiday, you are not doing rest wrong. You are carrying depletion, and it takes a while to put down.
Somewhere in the middle of that week it loosened. Not dramatically. Just enough that we were talking with our children rather than managing them, and with each other rather than past each other.
Psalm 23 came alive for me on that trip in a way it never had from a pulpit. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. That word restores carries the sense of bringing something back to its original condition — not topping it up, not patching it, but returning it to what it was made to be. That is a different thing from a break. It is what a break is for.
According to Barna Group research, ministry leader burnout has reached critical levels in recent years. What tends to get overlooked is that burnout does not stay with the leader. It moves through the house. The people who pay for a depleted pastor are rarely only the congregation.
What came home with us
We came home different. Not fixed — ministry life is never that simple. But softer, more connected, and I was present in a way I had not managed for a long time.
That trip is part of why MinistryVacations.org exists. Not as a business idea, but as a response to something I kept seeing in ministry circles and had lived myself: families running on empty, pastors who had not taken real time off in a decade, missionaries too guilty to rest. You can read more about why I started it, and about family vacations for ministry families if that is the season you are in.
If you have been circling a trip and talking yourself out of it, here is what I wish somebody had put in front of me sooner. The version of you your family gets when you are genuinely refreshed is not the same version they get when you are merely rescheduled. That difference is not small, and they can tell.
Where you go matters far less than the decision to go. Mexico, a river cruise through Europe, the ancient roads of the Holy Land — the geography is the smallest part of it. The decision is the part that costs something: saying out loud that you and your family are worth restoring.
Because you are. And the people you serve will be better for it.
He restores my soul. — Psalm 23:3
Ready to start planning? Contact me at Ministry Vacations — travel planning built around the real rhythms and real budgets of ministry life. Every trip also includes the Gratitude Giving Program, so your rest can bless your ministry at no extra cost.
