Making Sunday Special
This past week the idea of Sabbath was brought up in one of my Bible studies. It’s not the first time that I have considered the idea of Sabbath. Throughout most of my life I have spent significant time considering how to appropriately honor the Sabbath. When I was in high school my parents started something they titled “Making Sunday Special", a Saturday evening dinnertime celebration that centered around looking forward to Sunday. There were often miniature liturgies, silly scripts, tiny trinkets and poppers to explode in the closing of the gathering. What is of note in this celebration and ceremony that they created was that they didn’t wait until the Sabbath to actually start to focus on the Sabbath. They started the day before to prepare our hearts and minds.
As I’m engaging with truly looking at the commandments that God delivered to Moses and the Israelites I was struck with the question: What does keeping the Sabbath holy truly look like in a modern era? Truthfully, I think this is the commandment that I make excuses to get around the most. In a fast paced world where it seems every minute is meant to move you forward—and if you are standing still you might as well be moving backward—it feels uncomfortable to consider what God is really asking of me on the Sabbath.
I don’t have the answers yet, and there are many opinions on what honoring the Sabbath should look like. But this weekend I decided to take a step towards intentionally holding the Sabbath to a slower pace in my otherwise overly productive life. So yesterday I did all the laundry. My thought process was, if I do all the laundry then tomorrow it will be one less thing that I feel I’m getting behind on if I slow down. But as I continued to do load after load of the family’s washing, I noticed a rhythm of preparation that I hadn’t anticipated. Wash, dry, fold, put away. With each step that was carried out I was made aware of a preparation for the Sabbath.
Perhaps, the seed my parents planted all those years ago of starting on Saturday to prepare to celebrate Sunday was reviving itself within my soul. Could God be asking me to not just slow down on Sunday (leaving me stressed and feeling behind) but instead to prepare my heart and mind before the Sabbath? That in preparing I am able to rest without the distraction of work piling up and be more completely in the presence of the one I so often say, just give me a few more minutes to get this done before I pay attention to you.
