Everything Stops

I learned that the Hebrew word for sabbath means “stop.” Often in the Bible it is translated as “rest,” an equally valid translation, but to me the word rest has overtones of something different than “stop.” Life really did stop for us on Friday evening and Saturday in Tel Aviv. - Lynne M. Baab, Sabbath Keeping

Baab’s book, Sabbath Keeping, is remarkable. Remarkable and challenging. I have always thought that having a sabbath was a “good idea.” Just like lifting weights was a “good idea.” And drinking more than half a glass of water a day was a “good idea.” Sometimes it takes some persuasion to take a “good idea” and turn it into an “essential idea.” So it’s easy to see how having a sabbath seemed to be a “good idea”. Even though I would categorize myself as a type-A, go-getter type of a person, my low-stress life hardly demanded a need for a sabbath. But Baab’s writing is gentle yet firm in it’s persuasion. She described a world that seemed so foreign yet inviting to me. A world where, for one day, I would be still. I would breathe and rebreathe. I would become fresh and refreshed. The temptation is to open up and dissect Sabbath Keeping, analyzing all its different details, praising its triumphs and deriding its faults. But I’m not really interested in that. The book itself is well-worth reading and I leave it as an exercise to the reader, but I find myself drawn to this idea of a sabbath for two reasons. First, it is an invitation to be renewed, to be refreshed, to be re-created. Even if life is relatively low-stress, that is not the only benefit of a sabbath. A sabbath gives us the opportunity to pursue creativity in a way that is unavailable to us normally. It allows us to rethink, retreat, reshape, rejoice. It gives us a space to grow in new ways that we might not have thought of. Second, it is an exercise in faith. I love how Baab talks about how many of us aren’t human beings. Instead we are human doings. We become defined by what we do, how we do it, and what others think of that. I want to be free from that. I want to be whatever the Divine wants me to be and I want to be free to be reshaped in that way. Part of doing things different on the sabbath means that we are not obligated to do. The things we do in life to secure our livelihood, those things are important. But for one day, I am asked to trust in the providence of God and to acknowledge that He has already taken care of me for the past six days and this day is one of His many gifts to me. I am challenged to trust Him in this, to put my faith in Him. So what’s this blog thing? I dug up an old thought that I wrote in college about blogs. In re-reading it, there is created in me the same feeling I get when I see a carwreck; there are conflicting feelings of horror and awe that impel me to both look away and stare at the same time. It is, in my opinion, undeveloped in thought, style, and diction. But it was me. Perhaps it still is me. Except I wouldn’t say it exactly this way:

What blogs are for? Maybe they're for letting people know what's up with you. But sometimes I get the feeling that people blog just for themselves. Oftentimes there's no coherency or you'd have to know what that person was talking about to understand. So that sort of defeats the purpose of having a blog. The real quesion is: Would you blog if you KNEW that no one read it. haha. My poor excuse for a smiley face. I know that Ev's little checker won't reach this. I guess that's where the paradox lies: It seems that the blog is for the writer; yet when asked if they would still blog if they knew that no one would read it, the lingering suspicion is that they wouldn't. Curious. I personally am convinced that the Internet is the most frustrating mediums ever to be invented. On the one hand it is able to reach thousands, maybe (if you have a nice enough server) millions with your message. On the other hand it has a tendency to miscommunicate our communication. The message is devoid of tone, devoid of those subtle hints of meaning that we depend on in talking. We try to fix this by conjuring up smileys :); but they fall woefully short of being able to communicate what we feel. The combination of mass dispersion and inadequate communication is a scary combination. Reminds me of the time I wrote this mushy email to Mae and sent it to all my high school friends. So gross...and embarrassing. I think that's probably one of my most embarrassing moments. One could read this and say: "HEY! Avery's criticizing me." Or they could read this and say: "Why is Avery always joking around?" Or they could read this and say: "Ich könnte English lesen. Ich muß zum Arbeit gehen. Tchuß!" (German: "I can't read English. I have to go to work. Laters!") I've just seen too many misunderstandings over email/web to truly embrace it; in addition, I think it's a very yuppie way to say things. Instead of spending time with people, we spend time with mice and keyboards. Hah. If anyone is guilty of that it's me!

Completely unedited. I feel astonishingly naked. But in re-reading this, I realize that I am very different from the guy that wrote this six years ago. This place isn’t going to be my own personal rant-a-space; that’s why I got married: so I could have some one to rant to, instead of some thing. I want people to read these thoughts and respond to them. And I want to respond and to be changed by them. That is part of my hope for my sabbath, that one of the hallmarks of my sabbath would be that it would be a space for intro and outrospection in community. One of the things that I haven’t had or made time for is writing. Writing or reading. But mainly writing because I think my desire to write comes out of the things I read and I’ve been reading a surprising amount lately. In talking to the Wife, we talked about how I wanted to write. So here it is, my next (it’s definitely not my first) foray into the world of writing. The desire here is just to write for an hour, once a week, on my sabbath to rethink, regrow, rehope, reconnect, rebreathe.