A (hard fought-for) Sabbath

Well I survived my anniversary (oops, I should say our anniversary.) Actually it was very nice. The day of work left much to be desired, but Suzi and I had a wonderful meal at the local “Thirteen moons” restaurant. We decided to visit because it’s one of the fancier places in Robbinsdale and they redo the menu every new moon. The food’s pretty good too.

We received a special surprise as I was unwinding from what felt like a very unproductive day. In the middle of our meal my mother called. They were wondering if they could drop off our anniversary gift. I told her that we were out eating at 13 moons. “You’re kidding,” she said, “we have a gift certificate for you from 13 moons. Have you paid yet?” I told her we hadn’t and we could and would wait until they arrived. We figured we might as well use it now, since we don’t get a chance to ‘eat fancy’ that often.

After our relaxing meal we headed out to shop for my dad’s birthday, and then home where we could get in bed and . . . ah . . . ah . . . watch “Everybody Loves Raymond.” Channel 29 replayed the episode of Ray and Debra’s wedding in honor of our anniversary. How thoughtful.

But on to today. I actually forsook work for a day and sat around the house (although not in the sense of Weird Al’s song “Fat” where the over-sized subject of the song actually ‘sits AROUND the house.) The weather today was absolutely flawless—middle 60s to middle 70s with low humidity and not much wind. I meandered between the porch and the office as I read from a couple of new books. One which has resonated deeply with me is entitled “Reimagining Spiritual Formation. It is the story of a week in the life of a church in south Minneapolis, which I have attended a half dozen times in the last three years. The church, “Solomon’s Porch,” is pastored by a thoughtful guy whose blogs I love to read. He’s also linked to some other church leaders and laity through a group called “Emergent.” In dabbling through those links the past two days I came across another inspiring blogger by the name of Jay Voorhees. He was able to summarize well one of the areas with which God was challenging me. His words:

"To talk about purpose is to fall into the Calvinist notions of doing instead of being. It suggests that the most important thing in life is what we do (living out our purpose in the world) than being who we are (created in the image of God). It easily allows itself to move toward the Protestant work ethic which states that our value is in our accomplishment rather than our identity.
Certainly what we do is important; you can't read Matthew's Sheep and the Goats without realizing that. But are those works our purpose in life, or do they arise out of our identity as characters in God's story?"


So that’s a word I’ve been hearing from a number of places (maybe even “upstairs”) and had better start heeding. Today, a Saturday, I had my Sabbath (even though it was interspersed with mowing the lawn, cleaning out the garage, and motivating my teen-age daughter to help her mother around the house—so I’ve got a ways to go.) SHALOM