It’s been a week full of more work than I can do in a day, and at the end I must face uncrossed items on my to-do list. Earlier in the week, I noticed the low buzz of anxiety tensing my body and turning my stomach ever-so-slightly. I heard the Holy Spirit say, “You’re much better at working than playing aren’t you?” An invitation, not chastisement.
Realizing I needed to work harder at rest :), I pulled out a book that challenges me to live the radical reversal of Sabbath every day, Dan Allender’s Sabbath. I love this section on the super-abundance of Re-creation, beginning with a rarely-read (for me) verse from Joel 3:18:
“In that day the mountains will drip with sweet wine,
and the hills will flow with milk.
Water will fill the streambeds of Judah,
and a fountain will bust forth from the Lord’s Temple,
watering the arid valley of acacias.”
Dan tells a story told by Belden Lane:
A group of French people brought “a handful of Bedouin leaders to Paris to see the glory of their culture. They saw the Eiffel Tower and other architectural delights with polite boredom. But when taken to see a waterfall in the countryside, they stood in utter amazement. They waited for the surging flow to stop. ‘They refused to leave, adamantly declaring to their French guide that honor required waiting…waiting for the end. Knowing the water could not last much longer, they awaited the moment ‘when God would grow weary of his madness,’ when this wild extravagance would suddenly and finally exhaust itself.” (Dan quoting Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality.”
Nothing they had seen in their world paralleled a gushing flow of water that had run endlessly for thousands of years. We are the Bedouins who have learned to live in the desert of God’s absence for thousands of years, who cannot imagine the inexhaustible glory that has already been given us in Jesus, that pours through the cross and will pour forth with utter glory when he gloriously returns. The Sabbath gives us the opportunity to stand before the endless outpouring of superabundance and fill up our thimble of faith with a drop of bounty ahead.” Dan Allender, Sabbath
