From the Pastor
Dave Barry began one of his columns with these words: “Does this sound like you? You never have enough time. You can’t find anything. You’re surrounded by random piles of paper – unanswered letters, overdue bills, a ransom note dated last August (so that’s what happened to little Jason!)…” I don’t know if it sounds like you but it sure sounds a lot like me. “Where did I put that Dave Barry quote I want to use for the church newsletter? It was here just a minute ago!” So often it seems that I start the day behind and finish it even farther behind, slowly sinking beneath the waves of paper, e-mails and unanswered phone calls. And then it’s summer.
Now my temptation during the summer months, when there are fewer meetings and a little more time, is to try to catch up on everything on I didn’t get to during the winter and spring. So I will arrange my desk, read all my back journals, plan sermons, clean out my files, finish a book a week and, oh yes, do a little fishing. And so it is that July becomes just as hectic as March. Yes, I know God took a day of Sabbath, but clearly I am much busier than God. There must be another way.
In her book, Sabbath Sense, United Church of Christ minister, Donna Schaper says this about our modern use of time: “In our middle-class society today, fewer and fewer people organize their lives into ‘work’ and ‘rest’ slots. We work most of the time. We imagine little time off. We think we have obligations most of the time. We imagine little time for deeper emotions like joy or weeping. All time seems the same. It is as homogenized as the milk we drink. Time becomes the river in which we rush from one place to another.”
And so she argues for a re-claiming of the biblical concept of Sabbath – the separation of time into parts, all equally valuable, a separation of must from may, duties from desires, obligation from freedom. Sabbath is not something I do well.
But over the next couple of months I want to give it a try. Yes, there will still be much to do and much to plan, but during these summer months I want to be a person who both works and rests and who knows how, when and why I do either. May this be a season when I steal back some of my time from the chaos
Gene
