A Sabbath Day’s Journey

Let us therefore fear, lest, a promise being left us of entering into his rest, any of you should seem to come short of it (Hebrews 4:1).

We find that we’ve been running at a rather frantic pace—all our own commitments and rushing kids from place to place. We woke up Sunday morning; slept soundly in till eight. Considering our schedule, that’s sleeping in quite late. We both still felt exhausted so decided not to budge. (We’d been to church the night before, so don’t you start to judge.)

We were wide awake now; no way we’d get more sleep, so we talked about the Sabbath rest: the commandment no one keeps.

If even God Himself required rest one day in seven, why can’t we do His will on earth, the way it is in heaven? He cautions us lest busyness our Sabbath should intrude: what makes us think we can run non-stop and still not come unglued?

God desires to speak to us, but His voice is still and small; and if we won’t get really quiet, we won’t hear Him at all. He knows if we don’t practice shutting down each week, our head get full and noisy and we can’t hear Him when He speaks.

Our ancient fathers geared their lives to a very different clock: no one worked on Sundays—they just sat around and talked. The children were admonished not to run and shout and play, and were taught to keep things mellow on the sacred seventh day. No one travelled anywhere except the shortest trip. They spoke of “a Sabbath day’s journey” and strictly honoured it.

It seems they understood back then—and it seems we never will—that the mind and heart cannot slow down if the body won’t sit still.

Greg got up for a minute, then crawled back in and said, “‘A Sabbath day’s journey’: to the bathroom and directly back to bed!”

We stayed in bed and talked till noon, feeling mighty fine. Tension slowly seeped away, letting everything unwind. We got up and had some “brekkie”; then on the couch I dozed some more while Greg played card games with the kids beside me on the floor.

But he finally pulled himself aside from this low-key family fun, saying one thing he should really do is go for a good hard run. See, he had some tests a while ago to check his blood and all, and it turned out he has a problem with his cholesterol. The doctor says to exercise, get his health back up to par. Yet whatever a Sabbath day’s journey is, it isn’t very far.

We respect the doctor’s orders; they shouldn’t be ignored. But how to obey the doctor—and the Sabbath of the Lord?

Well, he looked after his cholesterol, yet did his soul no harm: we’ve got a treadmill—he took a trip and never left the farm.

There remaineth . . . a rest to the people of God. . . . Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest (Hebrews 4:9,11).

A Perfect Storm

You turned my wailing into dancing; you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, that my heart may sing to you (Psalm 30:11-12, NIV).

There had been a problem in the reprinting of a devotional booklet of mine, and I had been all bent out of shape for days now over what to do about it. I couldn’t decide if I was being too fussy or only being reasonable. Greg and I were sitting on the couch, and he was trying to talk me through it. (What a saint he is!) The main stress, beyond the thought of having to confront the printer who had done the job, was to decide if I should ask her to absorb the loss of the reprint.

“If it’s that important to you,” said Greg, “just pay to have it redone.” (This is one of his standard solutions to a problem: throw money at it, whether it’s in the budget or not. Easy for him to say—he’s not the tightwad in the family.)

“It’s not fair,” I protested. “If I paid twice for this job, do you know how much I would make on the sale of each booklet? As it is, I practically write for nothing anyway. I want my work to be validated, and that’s one of the ways this world validates work—with money!”

I was on the verge of tears, and he knew it. I excused myself to get a Kleenex before the storm broke. Found the box of tissues on my desk in the kitchen. I picked up the whole box, just in case. As I did, I noticed a card that I had received earlier from someone who was reading the devotional series. That note had been a tremendous blessing to me, seeing how God was moving in someone’s life through something I had written. I quickly re-read it, and the tears came then, in a torrent. I had been paid in full by the Lord, just in that single note, for my many hours of writing and editing.

I returned to Greg, holding Kleenex to my streaming nose and eyes, suddenly too overcome to speak. Joy and gratitude had collided now with my frustration and anxiety, subjecting me to a whirlwind of emotions. I leaned back into the couch, put my head back, and started to sob. But I was arrested by the awful, helpless look of concern on my dear husband’s face. I forced my constricted throat to speak, briefly and hoarsely: “It’s okay—I’m happy now.” Then the sobbing took over again. My goodness, this was quite a storm.

He leaned toward me from the other couch, elbows on his knees, chin in his big hands, watching me intensely. “You’re happy . . .” he said carefully. He said it like a statement, but it was definitely a question. “I see . . .” He paused. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing. “Would you like to tell me what you’re so happy about?”

I had a fleeting thought—that God should present every man embarking on marriage with a manual on women, entitled something like “When Your Wife Doesn’t Make Sense.” The humour in the situation enabled me to get a handle on my emotions enough to speak again: “What’s the matter? Don’t you understand me?” And then we both started to laugh.

I told him what God had shown me in the brief seconds I had been out of the room. The storm was over now: my words had quit blowing and the tears had stopped falling. The recognition of God’s goodness and His sovereignty shone in my soul like sunshine, and we both sat basking in the warmth of it.

Then [Jesus] arose, and rebuked the wind and the raging of the water: and they ceased, and there was a calm (Luke 8:24).