The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath by Mark Buchanan

Author:Mark Buchanan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: ebook, Christian Life, General, Religion, book, Spiritual Growth
ISBN: 9781418553517
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2007-03-11T06:00:00+00:00

If you do not go your own way, you will find your joy. We keep Sabbath by both a refusal and a pursuit: we refuse to go our own way, and yet we pursue our own joy. Legalism wants to name, in every jot and tittle, both that refusal and that pursuit. It seeks to pinpoint the precise nature of what we’re to shun and what we’re to run after.

But God leaves such things unspoken.

Yet clearly, doing as we please, going our own way, is not the same thing as finding our joy. These, in fact, are opposites.

Most of us know this already.

We know that when we do as we please and go our own way, we often as not court misery. We demand our inheritance, squander it, and end up in a pigpen, hungry and spent. This is one of the largest ironies and mysteries of being human: we insist, with pride and stubbornness, on getting our own way, even when that way plunders us wholesale. Paul describes it this way: “For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. . . . For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war . . .” (Rom. 7:18–19, 22–23).

Sabbath rest is negotiated in that space between not getting or going our own way and finding our true joy.

I discovered that in my postgraduate year of university. I began then to visit my wife’s ailing grandma Christie. I knew Grandma Christie—Jean Christie—only when she was old, her hair downy fine and bluish white, her skin creased and fragile like crepe paper. I had never known the hearty, wise, fierce, shrewd, tender woman my wife and her cousins described. I knew Jean only in her decline.

The Alzheimer’s that would finally ruin her mind was already eroding its edges, making it hard for her to remember simple facts, pull up common words. She was sweet—not cloyingly so but sweet like a fall apple, and with just enough of the Scottish Calvinist crispness of her upbringing still in her to know the sweetness wasn’t to be presumed upon. She was the family matriarch, indulged and revered by her eight children and many grandchildren, and increasingly her great-grandchildren.

So it was hard for many of them to watch her fail. Her memory got rapidly worse. She spun off into long, garbled soliloquies, involving people and places she must have known years before, in the old country. They were just strangers and rumors to everyone else. Her mind was a tottering house haunted by childhood ghosts. She talked almost constantly, a slurry of broken words and jumbled thoughts. She puffed up like raised dough from some new medication and then wizened up like a raisin from loss of appetite.

So

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