The Narrow Sabbath

Sundays have a way of narrowing the world.

In the morning, I spend a relaxing breakfast with my husband.  We go to our local church; we come home.  Upon coming home, we do whatever delights us:  I crochet or knit or read or write.  He listens to music and reads and plays games.  We make a more-elaborate-than-usual dinner because we both have time for the prep and the cleanup.

I don’t use my phone much.  I don’t scroll on the internet.  We don’t turn on the TV.   We do a lot of living in our little house, in our small community, in our little corner of the world.

This wasn’t a conscious choice, or at least it didn’t start as one.  We kept the Sabbath by not working and by attending church and spending time together.  But the manifestations of those choices—that we eschew our devices and most media, that we engage in slow and intentional things, that we settle down cozy in our house—have made the current era bearable.

The Sabbath forces us to tend to ourselves and our own communities.

Look, despite my best efforts to avoid the news I know exactly what is going on in the world.  My daily life is a torrent of information, ideas, and chaos I can’t seem to turn off: if not through my phone, through the computer, if not through the computer, the TV, if not through my devices, my panicked colleagues and friends. 

I hear perpetually about horrible things that I can do nothing, directly or immediately, to mend.  The news would have me meditate daily on the wretched state of the world.  The internet invites us to bathe in a miasma of both connected and disconnected stimuli: war, the Oscars, trending songs, binge TV, political horrors, violence, anger, TikTok videos, AI.

We weren’t meant to operate on this scale or at this level. We weren’t made to marinate in this stuff.

That doesn’t mean we can’t care or engage.  Indeed, we should, where the Spirit moves us.  But the acts of Christian love assigned to us are most often specific and local.  The Good Samaritan was a Good Samaritan not because he obliquely agonized over the fate of Jewish travelers on dangerous roads but because he treated a Jewish traveler he encountered, himself, on his journey.  Elijah did not end starvation and need for the world, but he gave the world back for one widow.  Christ turned water to wine at one wedding.

Sundays ask me to think not about all the grand unsolvable issues of the world but about Nan’s grandson in the hospital and Susan’s ailing parents and Ted’s wife in hospice care.  Sundays tell me that I cannot solve all the hunger in the world, but I can work at the church soup kitchen and feed local people in need.  I cannot demand the world start caring about God’s creation, but we can together go and tend to littered highways and byways in our area, clean up local parks, recycle or think about energy consumption.

I can’t save the world, but I can make roast chicken for the people I love.

I find myself acutely aware, lately, of the nihilism that surrounds me.  A dear colleague of mine, struggling both with the state of the world and his own personal life, tells me frequently that nothing matters, that nothing will change, that everything is awful and there’s no point in doing or not doing anything at all.  I suspect many people feel this way.  A creeping hopelessness is taking over our age.

That kind of nihilism disdains everything I am discussing here: the simple care of a meal made for loved ones, the hauling of cereal boxes from the car to the blessing box, the time spent wiping snotty noses or holding wrinkled hands.  That kind of nihilism dismisses those gestures as meaningless in the face of the nothingness before us.

But for me, these small places are where faith lives and grows.  They matter at a cosmic level.

We face great darknesses not through great strength but because of what God has granted us: not just the internal resources of the Spirit but the support of the church, of his people, the threads of love and grace and mercy that connect us.  Hear stories from suffering Christians in countries where believers are persecuted for their faith and the common theme is the communities, the people, the love that endures through difficult circumstances.

Because of Sundays, I have started “narrowing” some of the rest of my life.  That doesn’t mean I am huddling inside and turning off the lights to wait it all out.  Rather, I am putting away my phone, and the ceaseless information stream, and stepping out of the media pool to reflect on these questions:

What is around me here and now?

Where am I needed, here and now?

What can I give, here and now?

Who are my neighbors, here and now?

Where has God called me, here and now?

The answers guide me.  They give me direction.  And they call me from a paralysis wrought, I suspect, with great deliberation by the enemy.  To not act, in the face of darkness, is both surrender and despair.  To not act, because victory seems impossible, because good and decency seem impossible, is antithetical to the nature of faith.

To live victoriously does not always mean we run around waving banners and chest-thumping for Jesus.  Often, I suspect it means something like: to trust God with everything we cannot tend, so that we can turn our eyes to the land He has given us to nurture.

May your Sabbath refocus your gaze.