Thanks for letting me write to you again with another thing I'd do different with my leadership in Young Life if given the chance. Even with the strong current of demands that I had flowing against me, I would pay more attention to Sabbath-keeping. And I would do it, because He commands me to.
The beginning is to start with a right definition. Sabbath-keeping (Shabbat) is not taking a day off to do whatever I please. It means to re-create. For six days God created, on the seventh He shabbated... re-created. There is so much poured out of a space in me that needs to be re-filled, and keeping Sabbath is the only way this refilling can occur. A day of play and pray. A day of rest and worship.
I love this Billy Collins poem:
The Chairs That No One Sits In
You see them on porches and on lawns
down by the lakeside,
usually arranged in pairs implying a couple
who might sit there and look out
at the water or the big shade trees.
The trouble is you never see anyone
sitting in these forlorn chairs
though at one time it must have seemed
a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.
Sometimes there is a little table
between the chairs where no one
is resting a glass or placing a book facedown.
It may not be any of my business,
but let us suppose one day
that everyone who placed those vacant chairs
on a veranda or a dock sat down in them
if only for the sake of remembering
what it was they thought deserved
to be viewed from two chairs,
side by side with a table in between.
The clouds are high and massive on that day.
The woman looks up from her book.
The man takes a sip from his drink.
Then there is only the sound of their looking,
the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird
then another, cries of joy or warning -
it passes the time to wonder which.
Yesterday Kathie and I spent the afternoon doing what Billy suggests. We sat in two adirondack chairs in the backyard. And we walked around the yard a bit, talking of nothing much, stopping to question the placement of the spirea shrubs, then returning to the chairs for a few pages of something.
Sometimes I wonder:
Is the fourth commandment frivolous?
Then I recognize that I just spent some time wondering.
And think not.
