Many of you responded to last week’s article “The Journey of Sabbath” to say that you were really experiencing living in that tension of Sabbath priorities on the one hand and cultural demands for activity and achievement on the other.  I’d like to continue to explore this ancient idea of Sabbath as a metaphor of our life journey.  Sabbath is an attitude for approaching life and it might hold the key to a radical revolution in our church and our culture. 

Our American culture rewards achievement and we tend to glorify those who achieve the most.  There is a lot in this attitude that is good.  It has led to great achievements in many areas.  The problem arises when we as individuals and a society take our sense of self-worth and identity from these achievements.  We tend to borrow self from what we accomplish

At the core of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious tradition is the promise that what brings us to life is relationship with God.  In that relationship, we learn something of who God is as the underlying truth of the universe.  We also learn who we are – our genuine selves as God made us to be. The idea of Sabbath is to encourage and enable that learning and how it applies to our lives.

You are unique as a person, as I am, and we each live in unique partnership with God.  What is most important for you to do in your life will never be identical to what I or somebody else expects you to do.  God calls us to discern, even in our imperfect ways, what brings us to life and what brings life to others through us.  God calls us to embrace that life-bringing perspective and life-giving activity as a kind of lens through which to view the rest of our lives.  This lens becomes clear at the convergence of our dreams and God’s dream for us.  It is a lot like what Stephen Covey calls putting first things first (7 Habits of Highly Effective People).   

How do we know which lens is right for us?  That’s a product of the journey -- a process of getting to know ourselves and God.  We learn by paying attention to the quiet and powerful movement of the Spirit deep within us and to God’s invitation that often comes to us through other people.  The learning, like the growing, seems to reveal itself slowly and progressively -- one step at a time.  The new life that emerges on the journey asserts itself dynamically into our daily living in a way that is challenging, exciting, inconvenient, and sometimes frightening.

The challenge many of us face is to begin to our lives through the lens of abundance, the perspective that we already have all that we need for life to be whole and meaningful.  We can tend to equate abundance with doing a lot of things, and so our lives and our churches have lots of activities – lots of good activities.  Unfortunately, spiritual formation tends to become one more activity to schedule and one more bill to pay rather than the wisdom through which we make all our other choices.  How can we invest ourselves in spiritual formation without just adding one more thing?  How will we approach the biblical idea of abundance as not another commodity to be bought or sold?

The invitation of faith is to let go an attitude of scarcity and embrace an attitude of abundance.  Curiously, the scarcity attitude can be really hard to kick.  It is addictive in many ways.  The only way I seem to make such fundamental and challenging changes in my attitude is when the pain of trying to have it both ways gets acute enough.  It just might be that the pain of approaching burnout is the wake-up call that we need to change.  If so, then the call comes not only to us as individuals, but also to our churches.  It is important to ease the stressed related to this pain.  Stress can be destructive to body and mind.  Try meditation and prayer.  Also try exercise, yoga, or other activities.  Practice a hobby and laugh a lot!  It is also important to learn the lesson of your pain – what there may be for you beyond the strong desire for the pain to stop!  Ultimately, each of us needs to find ways to bring the locus of our power, authority, and choice back within ourselves.

If our churches have something of value to offer American culture, and I strongly believe they do, it is not to reinforce the need to achieve and succeed.  That force is already strong enough.  What we have to offer is the perspective of Sabbath that enables us to set goals worthy of our investment, in sync with our authentic nature in the Spirit, and life giving to us and through us.  This is the issue of our lives – how our faith journey will inform all the choices of our lives.  This is the challenge for our journey.  Do we really want to be called to life?

Thanks for continuing to bless me on the journey.

--Jack Price

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