Halfway

By Pastor Paul Gauche

Today’s Word: “halfway” as in… we’re at about the halfway point of the summer. I know, right? How did that happen?

I’m going out on a limb here, but I think you need a break. Could you use some time to recuperate? Could you benefit from stepping out of the usual rhythms of work into more generative spaces to breathe, slow down, or even stop? Can you set aside a good portion of a day for rest, renewal, restoration, and re-imagination? Can you, in these next seven weeks, find some sabbath in your life?

There is a powerful model for sabbath woven into the Genesis poem. The writer uses these finite words to describe something infinite: “God rested on the seventh day from all the work that had been done…” It goes on to say that God “blessed the seventh day and hallowed it…” The word ‘hallowed’ means to remove something from common usage. It’s as if God removed one day from common usage, perhaps to discover something uncommon. We need days like this. We need uncommon days. We need days that give us a break from the common, ordinary rhythms that knock the living stuffing out of us. We need a day of emptying to create room for something new.

This raises a question. If a sabbath day is a day for being and not doing, how do we experience that? The question isn’t what will we ‘do’ with our sabbath rest. The question is more about ‘being’ in a sabbath place which is far more about our relationship with needing to be busy.

Instead of trying to figure out how to manage a day of rest, maybe the day just gets to manage us. What does that mean? What does that look like? More really good questions. We probably need just one whole day to dwell in that. I know this for sure: Sabbath is life-giving. So just chill out a bit, would you? Dial it back, just a bit. Take some time – or rather, just be in the time. Be restful. Be in the margin. Be.

#100days50words

Paul Gauche is the Pastor of Life Transitions at Prince of Peace. His posts are part of his #100days50words project, where he blogs about a different word each day. You can follow his project on Instagram (@pgauche), or on his blog, Thriving Rhythms.