2009/04/23: A Sabbath For The Soul

“Cease striving and know that I am God” (Psa 46.10).

In a short essay I read recently, Rick Warren makes the point that too many of us live “on the margin.” He doesn’t mean on the margin of our society, or our wealth, or our comfort zones. He means on the margin of our ability to cope with life.

Dr. Richard Swenson says, “The conditions of modern day living devour margin. If you’re homeless we direct you to a shelter. If you’re penniless we offer you food stamps. If you’re breathless we connect you to oxygen. But if you’re marginless we give you one more thing to do. Marginless is being thirty minutes late to the doctor’s office because you were twenty minutes late getting out of the hairdresser because you were ten minutes late dropping the children off at school because the car ran out of gas two blocks from a gas station and you forgot your purse. That’s marginless.”

Here are some factoids that probably impact almost all of us: 

• People now sleep 2 1/2 fewer hours each night compared to people from one hundred years ago.
• The average work week is longer now than it was in the 1960s.
• The average office worker has 36 hours of work piled up on his or her desk. It takes three hours a week just to sort through it and find what we need.
• We spend eight months of our lives opening junk mail, two years of our lives playing phone tag with people who are too busy to answer, and five years waiting for people who are trying to do too much and are late for meetings.

In my conversations with business people who are now in the 60s and 70s, they admit - thus far without exception! - that the pace of life and work is much higher than 20 or 30 years ago. Our “conveniences” have just made it more convenient to be occupied all the time! Work, education, entertainment - it doesn’t matter - we don’t know how to be still.

I have a theory about this. I recently ran across a quote from Donald Bloesch: “The Fathers of the Church were not afraid to go out into the desert because they had a richness in their hearts. But we, with richness all around us, are afraid, because the desert is in our hearts.” In other words, he’s suggesting that we’re afraid to be alone, because we’re perhaps afraid of what we’ll find - or won’t find - there.

Contemplation, quiet, time alone; even Jesus needed to occupy himself in that way. Are we so skilled at life that we don’t need what our Savior needed?