Good Friday Morning!
I hope you are all well and are discovering the surprises that this season of Lent can bring when we simply let ourselves be and walk with Jesus each day. Along with “The Sanctuary for Lent”, which is the little devotional book that we all were given a few Sundays ago, I am reading a book called “A Different Kind of Fast”, by Christine Valters Paintner. Instead of inviting me to fast from some of the things I possess (or eat/drink!), she invites me to fast from some of the things I do……usually things that really are not that good for me. For example, for the third week of Lent she has invited me to fast from speed and rushing, and to instead embrace slowness and pausing.
I want to tell you that I think she’s got something here! She is basically saying, put aside busy, busy, busy, as if it were some kind of medal for success, and put on simply being present in your own life. Put aside the understanding that being busy is being fulfilled in life, and put on the wonderful discovery that fulfillment is something as simple as breathing in and breathing out………saying as you breathe in, I let go and as you breathe out, and rest……fulfillment is paying as much attention to listening to the little bird singing in your back yard as you do checking off your responsibility on the committee you joined and immediately wondered why…… or taking a long look at the moon…….or simply sitting and remembering all the gifts of life that are yours.
In her book, Staying Awake, Tyler Sit offers this beautiful interpretation of the first creation story in Genesis:
After working to create the universe, “then She rested.”
Sit goes on to say: God discovered a point at which, even in Her infinite expansiveness, even with all of Creation bowing to Her every word, even as the author of time itself, She took a break.
And God didn’t apologize for it; She wasn’t dramatic about it. She rested because she wanted to rest, plain and simple. Then She blessed that day and made it holy.
Holy!
All the other days She calls “good”, but the Day of Rest is holy.
Y’all, I hope you will find time this Lent to rest in the holiness of God. I hope you will find plenty snatches of time in which you won’t worry one iota about accomplishments, or whether or not you have achieved anything! Just rest. Look. Listen. Be. Breathe.
Don’t apologize for it! Take a break! Keeping Sabbath – intentional resting from it all – is one of the most vital spiritual practices. It forces us to leave all the committees, all the responsibilities, all the “Empire-based centering of work” and to just leave our pajamas on and BE! To be in the simple presence of God. As Paintners says, “rest allows me to taste another world and way of being”.
Peace,
Rev. Martha Dye