Scripture for Dec 30th - Jan 5th: Leviticus 25:1-12

Alison's thoughts...

I've been reading a great book, "The Year of Living Biblically" by A.J. Jacobs. This is a non-fiction year long account of Jacobs attempting to live out every law in the entire bible (both old and new testements). Each chapter is based on a month of the year and for various days he records a particular law that he attempts to follow literally that day and discusses how well he was able to integrate it into his life. Once a law is incorporated one day, he is to continue with it for the rest of the year. His thoughts on sabbath have really stood out for me.

In discussing the Jubilee aspect of Sabbath, letting the land rest and forgiving debts or IOUs and on a personal part not working during the sabbath, he reminded me of how this applies to our year of Sabbath. Our attempt of not having many face to face meetings where we would need to travel across the country to gather, which would add polutants to the air and such, our use of online resources like the blog and this facebook group (not to mention email) to lessen the excessive use of paper to communicate. No doubt we've had some challenges with these forms of communication and we've learned how to make the best of them, and communication is happening.

One of the things that I've learned so far in my Sabbath journey this year is how difficult it is for me to remember to take my Sabbath time. I get so busy and wrapped up in all the work that I'm doing, that I forget or I procrastinate, "I'll just take my time tomorow"...it's been tough most weeks. Then I came across this passage by Jacobs.

"Day 97. It's a Tuesday afternoon in December, but I feel like I've just experienced my first real Sabbath.

Let me explain: The doorknobs in our apartment fall off on an alarminly regular basis. They're mercurial little suckers. We don't even need to be touching them -it's more of a natural-life-cycle type of situation, like icebergs calving or my hairline retreating. I'll be in bed, reading my Bible, and I'll hear a thud and know that another doorknob succumbed to gravity.

Usually, I screw the knob back on. Problem solved -for a week or two anyway. No bid geal. But this morning, it became a big deal. At 9:30am I stop typing my emails and shuffle over to the bathroom -and close the door behind me. I don't realise what I've done until I reach for the nonexistent inside doorknob. It had molted sometime during the night.

For the first ten minutes, I try to escape. I bang on the door, shourt for help. Now answer. Julie is away at a meeitng, and Jasper is out fwith his babysitter. I've seen Ocean's Eleven, so I know to look for the grill in the ceiling that I can unscrew, climb into, slither through an air chute, drop into my neighbor's bedroom, make a clever comment like 'just thought I'd drop in,' and then return home. No grill. I'm trapped.

The next half-hour I spend going through a checklist of worst-case scenarios...

Even more stressful to me is that the outside world is speeing along without me. Emails are being answered. Venti lattes are being sipped. George Bush's childhood friends are being appointed to high-level positions...

But I'm ok with it. It doesn't cause my shoulders to tighten. Nothing I can do about it. I've reached an unexpected level of aceeptance. For once I'm savoring the present. I'm admiring what I have, even if it's 32 square feet of face marble and an angled electrical outlet. I start to pray. And perhaps for the first time, I pray in true peace and silence with out glancing at the clock, without my brain hopscotching from topic to topic.

This is what Sabbath should feel like. A pause. Not just a minor pause, but a major pause. Not just a lowerin gof the volume, but a muting. As rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, the Sabbath is a sanctuary in time."(The Year of Living Biblically, pg 123)

So based on that, I'm not going to look myself in my bathroom. But I have a renewed sense of encouragement that the practice of Sabbath is hard work for some of us, and in the most unexpected experience Sabbath may be found. Over Christmas I was very ill with what the doctor said was early pneumonia or broncitis, I've had this over a dozen times in my life and every time I get really sick and run down and tired. I try to keep doing all that I can and then I hit a wall and all I can manage to do is rest at home (not really sleep because the constant coughing keeps me up for at least 20 hours a day). On Christmas morning, I woke up at 4:00am. As I drank water and read, I sat and I prayed. No one else was up yet, they wouldn't start to get up for about an hour (my Dad and my sister's in-laws get up before the sun rises). I realized that was my sabbath time during the Christmas business.

Have you ever entered into a non-planned Sabbath time? (such as being locked in a bathroom or awaking way too early, etc)