Reclaiming God’s Time

Are you in to rebellion?

Resistance?

Protest?

Then the Sabbath is for you. Think Sabbath is about doing nothing? Wrong!

The Sabbath rest is an act of justice. In taking a day off, for that day, you are not living under the rules of a world that say you must be productive in order to be worthwhile. You are not accountable to any master but the true Master.

When you take Sabbath, you acknowledge that God’s time is not Sunday. God’s time is not chronological. God’s time is when we enable ourselves to simply be children of God and to focus on things that enable us to heal, to hear, to let God in and to let love reshape us and justice renew us.

If we’re going to be effective participants in the work of justice in our communities and our country, we are going to need more than just a day off from time to time to recharge our batteries. It takes more than a lost weekend of Netflix binging to reclaim our personhood. It requires some radical Sabbath-taking.

The time we spend on God’s time is not wasted time at all. That in fact, we are actually more effective and more productive and better equipped to shine the light of Christ when we have truly taken time to renew and replenish.

Thomas Merton once wrote:

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence. The rush and pressures of modern life are a form of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, to succumb to violence … The frenzy of the activist … destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

Thomas Merton

Merton wrote those words before I was born. Before 24-hour news cycles. Before the world wide web.  Before the I-phone. Could Merton have imagined just how much worse it could get?

You don’t want to kill off your root of inner wisdom. You want to nourish it and help it grow.

But to do it, you will have to break some rules. Not God’s rules, but the world’s rules. Living, just for a day or even a couple of hours, on God’s time is counter-cultural and even, for many of us, counter-intuitive.  But it can be done. Even today. Especially today.

The times in which we are living call for radical resistance and rebellion. It’s time to follow another set of rules and respond to a higher authority.

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