Creation Returned

"'What happens when we stop working and controlling nature?" Moishe Konigsberg responds. "When we don't operate machines, or pick flowers, or pluck fish from the sea?...When we cease interfering in the world we acknowledge that it is God's world.'" (6-7)

I love this imagery. When we stop working, playing, eating, we become to a still sense that we are not alone. I found this when I worked for Decatur Memorial Hospital and Hospice. I would walk into patient's rooms and find a uneasy silence. Through being sick these people were required to stop. Stop working, stop eating, stop fighting, stop driving, stop everything that was ordinary in their lives. They were found dependant on other people where they had the chance to sit in stillness and review their lives thus far.

Whenever I visited hospice patients I found storytelling. My first visit was with an elderly women who lived in a assisted living community. She came to tell me her life story. Who she was married to, who her children were, how they came and visited for Christmas, who took care of her, where she used to live, what she used to do, how she used to serve within the church. This woman's struggle with the church was herself. She could no longer serve, take communion, attend weekly worship meetings. She felt her faith had teetered and was fading.

I found this need to tell stories was great within all hospice patients. The more you inquired the deeper the story went.

The first discipline that Winner discusses is keeping the discipline of keeping the Sabbath. Sabbath keeping was not a part of my upbringing. Actually 75% of my family was active on Sunday mornings within the worship band and by the time Sunday afternoon we were all exhausted. I heard about Sabbath keeping in college but I was in college. Discipline was not necessarliy on the top of the list, even though it should have been.

While reading this first chapter I kept coming back to creation. As Christians we are not required to keep Sabbath. We are not even commanded to keep Sabbath. However, when we choose to let our time point our lives to Jesus we have found Sabbath.

My preaching professor said it best, "Get to your calenders first." Often times we find we have no time for new things, like excercise, friendly dinners, family time, or date night. I think that is because we let our calenders ruin our lives. We forget to surrender our time to Christ. And the best part is that we don't even have to make up some new trendy way to surrender our calenders; the Sabbath!

The reason that we surrender our time is not so that we can be more productive or so that we can rest from our crazy schedules, but so we can recognize our stories within the Kingdom. We can have a chance at reflecting on God and who he is and what he has done. We have the chance to stop creating, to stop worrying, to stop consuming, and to start reflecting on creation and resurrection. We shouldn't wait until we are at the end our of our lives to recall and reflect. We shouldn't have to be forced into a stillness through sickness or loss to find our time is important and is fleeting.

As Christian we are called to live radically different than the world. Why don't we start with surrendering our time to Christ?