Sometimes it’s good to get away from it all. Life gets busy and it feels like everything is crowding in. It can be hard to think straight, to see straight. Sometimes it’s good to get a completely different view.

During a time of sabbatical leave I spent two weeks hiking a section of the GR10 path in the French Pyrenees. This is a famous long-distance route that traverses the Pyrenean mountains from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. To walk the entire route normally takes six weeks or more. For me, just a two-week stage was enough, but what a two weeks it was: two weeks of beautiful scenery, over high mountain passes, still carrying snow in mid-summer, and down into glorious valleys, filled with spectacular flowers. The Pyrenees feel remote and most days I didn’t even cross a tarred road.

The absence of cars, shops and the normal stuff of life was refreshing. For two weeks I was away from TV and the internet and advertising. I travelled by train (my first experience of a slow French sleeper train) and when I got off the Eurostar in London on my way home and down into the underground system I was struck by the tawdriness, the worldliness, in some instances the outright sinfulness, of the advertising. Things I wouldn’t have noticed two weeks previously now stood out in stark relief. It was all sex and money. Two weeks in the purity of the mountains made me see things differently.

It wasn’t as if I’d suddenly grown easily shockable or morphed into a Victorian matron. It was more that the change in perspective helped me see more clearly than I had before.

At the same time I had been reading John Piper’s Brothers, We Are Not Professionals. (A book that should be required reading for all pastors.) In that book Piper has a line about our, “pride, unbelief, indifference, ingratitude, impurity of mind, worldliness of goals.” That stood out for me in stark relief too. It stood out because those were traits – sins – that I could so easily see in the culture I inhabit. More importantly, I recognised them in myself.

One of the reasons it is a good idea for pastors to take occasional sabbaticals is that doing so provides space to see things differently, and there is some different seeing we need to do. The reality is that without realising it we can become thoroughly worldly in our thinking. We can fall into what I call ‘respectable sins’.

In response I preached a series in our church that then became a little book: The Gospel for Respectable Sinners. In it I look at the dangers for us in falling into respectable sins and describe the glorious alternative of living in God’s wonderful grace. It’s a short book so you might actually finish it (I think most Christian paperbacks tend to be far too long!). As well as being helpful for individuals a number of churches have already found it particularly useful in small group settings.

If you’re in the UK you can get hold of it here. In the USA, here.