Keeping the Sabbath - Part 1

DAILY BYTE

A golfer was hacking his way through deep rough. In frustration he glared at his caddy and asked him why he kept on looking at his watch. The caddy replied, “Boss, this isn’t a watch, this is a compass.”

It’s a little story which speaks quite profoundly into our lives. For most of us, I guess, spend much of our lives hacking through the rough, as it were. For that’s what life is like - much of the time it’s pretty rough going.

It’s rough going in the workplace, where there are demands and deadlines and all sorts of stresses.

It’s rough going at school and at varsity, with the hugely stressful pressures of assignments and exams.

It’s rough going in our marriages at times, two people trying to stay connected in a noisy, busy world full of distractions and competing pressures.

It can be rough going in our homes, whether it be the demands of a crying baby, or the emotional upheavals of a sensitive preschooler, or the sullen silence of a confused and angry teenager.

It can be rough going in early adulthood, with the lurking fear of never finding someone to love and spending one’s life alone.

It can be rough going in the twilight years, with the struggles of ailing health or family living far away.

Much of the time life can be pretty rough going. And most of us know what it’s like to be hacking our way through it. That’s the way it is. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

An old green keeper, who loved to walk through the remote sections of the woods of his golf course, once said, “If you always hit straight and true you miss a lot of the territory.” I rather like that. It’s encouraging for those of us who discover that a lot of life is lived in the rough. Which is what makes it the great adventure that it is. And sometimes, yes, we simply have to do the best we can as we hack our way along.

But in the little story with which I began, the caddy, you’ll recall, had a compass. Because he knew that it’s one thing hacking your way through the rough, sometimes that’s just the way it is. But if you do so without any sense of the direction in which you should be heading, well that’s just an exercise in futility. And nobody wants to live a futile life. Everybody wants their efforts to mean something. Everybody wants to be heading somewhere worthwhile. Having a compass makes a lot of sense, especially for those of us who spend a lot of time out in the rough.

In these devotions this week we’ll be looking at a particular compass that comes to us as a powerful and precious gift from our faith tradition. It’s the compass of the SABBATH. Many people today think that this is an old-fashioned concept that has little to say to the realities of our modern-day lifestyles. But nothing could be further from the truth.

And for people who have lost their way and find themselves deep in the rough, unsure of what they’re doing or where they’re going, the Sabbath can be the means whereby their lives are re-aligned and re-orientated again.

PRAY AS YOU GO

Gracious God, sometimes as I live my life it feels like I’m hacking my way through deep rough with little sense of where I’m heading. I know that you are my true-north, and that life is at its very best when it is aligned upon you. Thank you that the Sabbath is a powerful way whereby this re-alignment can happen. As this theme is explored this week, challenge and inspire me Lord to re-assess my commitment to keeping the Sabbath. Amen.

FOCUS READING

Isaiah 56:2 (The Message)

‘How blessed are you who enter into these things,
you men and women who embrace them,
Who keep Sabbath and don’t defile it.’