Continuing our week-long travel metaphor, one of the most grueling things about long-haul travel is what it does to us physically. The inactivity makes us sore and cranky, and generally we make worse decisions about food while traveling than we would at home. Food is frequently either harder to get or of lower quality than the ideal. Boredom makes us snack more, and when driving, the need to stay awake often leads to some sketchy choices. The sleep cycle is easily disrupted for a grand variety of reasons. In this season of social distancing, we find ourselves facing similar issues—inactivity, challenges both choosing and procuring good food, and disrupted sleep cycles. In both cases, it’s simply harder to maintain good health habits without a whole lot of intentionality.
At the heart of maintaining good health habits is the principle of self-care. Self-care is the notion that you are worth the effort of maintenance. You, as a person, require a certain degree of care to function reasonably well that is neither selfish or indulgent. This may seem like an incredibly simple, obvious idea, but it’s amazing how many of us have excuses and mental blocks about it when the rubber hits the road. Ever find yourself thinking any of these things? “I have no time for exercise.” “It doesn’t matter if I don’t get a yearly check-up; I already know what my health issues are.” “If I don’t sleep enough, I’ll just have some coffee in the morning and be OK.” “I’m a professional, and professionals work hard even if they don’t feel well.” “It’s selfish to go on vacation/set aside a devotional time/eat good food/sleep enough/etc. when others need me.” “But I’m making an important sacrifice!” What all these statements have in common is the idea that you are not valuable enough to take care of. The most insidious are probably the last three, which I see most often in my fellow denominational employees. This kind of thinking crosses the line from a cheerful sort of negligence into the realm of a serious martyr complex. While it’s true that there are certain situations that demand specific kinds of self-denial, the God I worship abhors human sacrifice. Working in the service of God is, by its nature, very demanding, but for that very reason self-care ought to be an even higher priority. If you neglect your health in the name of “mission” long enough, you will lose your capacity to contribute to it. It is vital to remember that God made you with a body and that your body’s limitations are not inherently bad. In fact, some of the first words God spoke to Adam were about where to find some good food. On his first day of life, God had Adam take a nap. Shortly thereafter, God even gave Adam and Eve an entire day off before they’d even had a chance to do much that we would even recognize now as work. Practicing good self-care right now demands almost as much intentionality as it does while traveling. It’s a lifelong struggle that constantly requires thinking, planning, and adjusting. Use your skills of observation periodically to consider the state of your body. Are you getting enough water, exercise, and sleep? What are the quantity, quality and balance of your food like? Do you feel hungry, stuffed, a little sick, or just right after you eat? Is your body capable of doing the activities you love without you being really sore afterward? Is your caffeine intake out of control? (A good way to gauge this is whether you get a headache from skipping it even after a good night’s sleep.) Do you feel rested in the morning? Have you brushed and flossed your teeth lately? How often do you shower? (Showering isn’t just about getting clean—the steam helps to clear out your sinuses and the warm water can really help soothe those tight muscles.) Are you thirsty? Is your skin really dry? Most of the misery I’ve experienced on flights has had something to do with the physical dimension: not enough sleep beforehand, not enough water, not enough food, or unusually inhumane seats (here’s looking at you, Spirit). Just as much of that misery could have been reduced with more kindness towards my body (either on my part or that of the airline), a good deal of yours can, too. The human body is a complex marvel of divine engineering with interdependent systems medical science will be studying until the time of the end. You don’t need a degree in medicine, though, to take some small step to improve your health. Baby steps in the right direction are still progress; over time, they add up.
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One of the more entertaining ways of answering the question “Are we there yet?” is to look out the window or check the GPS. On airplanes, there’s something neat about seeing the fluffy cloud shapes outside the window or what countries you’re flying over on the GPS. In cars, it can be fascinating to appreciate what’s in the wide-open spaces between cities. On Highway 5 from LA to Napa, I like taking a moment to appreciate the things I only as they fly past my window on that trip. Obviously, it’s not sustainable to stare at every last field the entire drive, but after decades of traveling that highway, I actually have favorite parts that I look forward to seeing.
The journey we are on now also contains sights that can only be seen in transit. I love seeing the creativity and variety of all the homemade masks people are making. (I want one. I am so tired of my bandana, and I just haven’t made the time to crochet one yet.) I love seeing the creative ways that teachers and parents are finding to engage children. I love hearing the birds better because there are fewer man-made sounds getting in the way. I find the different ways stores and my blood bank implement social distancing really interesting. The art of observation is the art of noticing life as it happens. To keep us from getting overwhelmed, our minds tend to edit out a good deal of information as we go about our day. For example, very few of us could accurately describe everything in the room we’re sitting in if we had to shut our eyes. Reality is so complex that we don’t have the ability to retain everything that comes in through our senses. To retain it, we have to pay active attention to it, and that takes curiosity. One of the greatest gifts my parents gave me was a curiosity about the world. Plop either of them anywhere, and they will notice stuff and wonder about it. Because of this, I rarely see them get really bored. Part of this is just an occupational hazard—they’re teachers like their fathers before them, who were also insatiably curious about the world—but it’s also a way of life. Someone who has actively cultivated curiosity can find one thing to observe and follow a train of questions to discover books worth of fascinating insights. The wondrous practical upshot of this is that it allows you to take in more entertainment value from your surroundings, a crucial skill if you are trapped inside due to social distancing. If you have not cultivated observation skills, a great place to start is by using the five senses in turn: What do you see? What do you hear? What do you taste, touch, or smell? For each of the senses, you can actually grow through exercise and education. When I learned how to draw from life, it opened up a whole new world for me. Even though I wasn’t very good, I was grateful to have a new way of looking at things. Listening to music actively is a lifelong skill. The ability to notice shades of flavor, texture, and smell comes through practice. Like distraction, observation can be a great way to blot out worry. When I’m really stressed, staring at my cat for a while actually helps me get my mind off of things. Unlike distraction, observation can also help you collect information that can help you find and solve real-world problems. In the course of staring at said cat last week, I finally noticed that he was underweight and adjusted his diet accordingly. My cat is happier now because I actually took the time to observe him properly. You will inevitably notice more problems than you can actually solve. In this room alone, I see many things that could use a good sorting and tidying, a clock that needs winding, some furniture that needs dusting, walls that need repainting, carpet that needs replacing, and pretty flowers I ought to photograph before they wither. Noticing this much input can be overwhelming, which is why it’s important to make peace with your limitations. Because reality is too big for any one human being to appreciate in its entirety in one lifetime, observing it can easily be a lifelong endeavor. The more you do it, the more you will appreciate how big it really is and how impossible it is to understand, let alone solve, all of it. It’s worth the effort, though, to try because that is how progress not only happens, but can be celebrated. I’m not just glad the sun finally came out; I’m also glad I noticed it. Light is too beautiful to take for granted. Take some time each day to observe your surroundings. Make note of what you see, hear, taste, touch, and feel. Ask questions about them that make you look closer. You might be amazed by what you discover. To survive a long-haul flight, distractions are so useful that with the exception of Spirit, all airlines I’ve flown provide them in some form. Some of these are as basic as in-flight magazines or music, but longer flights tend to include movies, games, or even an outlet for one’s own device. This is a practical decision on the part of the airlines: pleasantly distracted passengers just cause less trouble, in general, than grumpy, bored passengers. In our long-haul flight of social distancing, we need them too.
Of course, just like on an airplane we must remain alert to important information. Don’t be that person who tries to take a stroll down the aisle while the plane is bucking and the attendants have retreated to their jump seats; use common sense. If the government says to avoid going to the grocery store and pharmacy, definitely don’t go holding house parties either. Also, unlike on an airplane, most of us still have our regular occupations to consider—work, school, and taking care of the household’s needs. None of these important things should be neglected. When rightly chosen and used, though, distractions help pass the time, keep the mind occupied, and add a nice dose of anesthetic to a very uncomfortable situation. By their very nature, long periods of time without a notion of how to fill them make people a bit crazy. There’s a reason why solitary confinement is considered cruel, and why sailors on long voyages were known to experience the original cabin fever. Time does strange things when there is nothing to fill it and no structure to make sense of it. If we have no useful task to fill it with, we need to find a way to fill the time to stay sane. Two hours of silently staring into the void does not pass quite as quickly as two hours doing almost anything else. I believe that a part of why children get bored faster than adults is that we have more years of experience in our brains to occupy our thoughts when external activity ceases. They simply have less mental furniture to play with because they haven’t had as much time to collect it. Adulthood’s crowded mental landscape comes with its own problems, of course: overthinking everything can legitimately make things worse. When flying, thinking too hard about the fact that there’s a mile of empty space between you and the ground with only invisible forces holding you aloft is a great way to induce a messy panic attack. Right now, thinking too hard about how easily the virus can be transmitted through entirely symptomless carriers can have a similar effect. Just acknowledge and respect these things in brief, and move on without dwelling on them too much. The beauty of the matter is that if your brain is busy doing one thing, it’s less likely to waste its energy panicking about something else. Keeping your mind occupied is critical right now, whether it’s with the practical stuff of life or a distraction—anything to keep worry, fear, and panic at bay. If you are busy thinking about your game, movie, craft project, book, exercise routine, pot on the stove, pet, child, musical piece, or job, you have less room in your head to worry. Choose your weapon wisely, though: if you’re cruising along cheerfully through a TV series and they dump an episode involving a pandemic on you, just skip it. If your thoughts about your children or job turn into fears of losing said children or job, take a deep breath and refocus on the present tasks of raising your children and doing your job. If you are blessed with either, there is plenty to think about in the process of getting things done without dwelling in the fear zone. One of the most basic elements in treating the worst cases of depression is getting the person to the point where there’s enough pleasure to balance out the pain—without resorting to something that creates more pain over time (like drugs, overeating, overspending, acting out sexually, etc.). While pleasure isn’t the end goal of life, we all need just enough of it to balance out the pains and discomforts of life to keep going. In this way, healthy distractions are like anesthetic. They help us survive the pain of life’s complexities. Just like anesthetic, the dose needs to be carefully adjusted to circumstances—you need some to get by, but you can’t be under ALL the time or you’ll never wake up. But you do need some. For this reason, try to choose the sorts of distractions that actually make you feel good for having spent time on them. Cheerfully roughhousing with one’s kids or playing with one’s pets tends to create a more satisfactory kind of pleasure than binge-watching something alone. Building and creating something tangible can be more delightful than just filling the time with something passive. Once when I was in a hospital, the other patients and I spent more time coloring and talking than watching TV even though it was constantly available, because it just made us, well, happier than watching TV. Try a few things to find what works for you. It will take time to get the right “dose” and it will require adjusting along the way. As you learn and adapt, you’ll find the time go by faster and maybe, just maybe, whenever we all re-emerge into public life, you’ll be in a better mood, too. Every Tuesday during the school year, I teach a junior high Bible class. This last week, I had them write me questions about the current situation. To my surprise, the vast majority had the same question: “How long will the pandemic/social distancing last?”
That’s the question, isn’t it? Wouldn’t we all like to know? I did a little research and I have well-educated guesses, but they’re just that: guesses. The most optimistic ones I’ve seen with any degree of research behind them discuss the end of May, but I’ve seen models stretching up to a year. New data comes in every day that changes these models, leaving everyone a little stir-crazy and confounded by the uncertainty of it all. However, even if someone managed to set a perfect, accurate date to restart everything, the question would remain. This isn’t just about the frustrations of not having a fixed date to plan around (maddening as it is), but the question every child asks on a road trip at some point: “Are we there yet?” “Are we there yet?” is not actually about arrival, just like “How long will this last?” isn’t just about dates. A kid can look out the window and see that they’re not there yet. Both questions really mean something along the lines of, “I’m really tired of being cooped up in this enclosed space and want it to be over already so we can get to the good stuff.” I don’t want to be trite in invoking the old saying, “It’s not about the destination; it’s about the journey.” I’ve traveled enough to tell you that I really wish someone would invent transporters so that one can go from LA to Europe/the Middle East/South America/wherever without the day and a half’s worth of brutal, tedious flying in between. The older I become, the less patience I have for these long flights and the jetlag they give me. In my teens and college years, it was exciting and fun to board a long-haul flight and wonder what people I’d meet on the plane, have uninterrupted reading time, enjoy drinks I don’t have at home (soda and coffee), and catch a movie or several that I haven’t seen before. I’ve even crocheted whole scarves on long-haul flights. Back then, I might’ve actually invoked the journey-not-destination thing. Now, my body gets crabby from the inactivity, persistent noise, irregular sleep, and incredibly dry air. Air travel has become something I put up with to get where I want to go, a disciplined art of building anticipation for the destination through suffering and delayed gratification. To survive a long-haul flight, a road trip, or our current situation, we don’t have to pretend that the journey is as good or better than the destination. We just have to get through it. Getting through it is a mind game: what can I do with the resources at hand to make this experience enjoyable, or at least bearable? Seasoned travelers prepare for their flights with ear plugs, reading materials, games, headphones, sleep masks, chewing gum, a water bottle to refill in the airport, comfortable clothing, and snacks to supplement the airline’s (usually) meager offerings. For a road trip, there is a similar dynamic, just with fewer space restrictions and the guaranteed ability to look outside the window. To dig in for this long-haul journey we’re all experiencing, we need to assess what resources we can call on to make it to the destination. There is an art to waiting, and a number of approaches to doing it that all work for different people at different times. We will be looking at some of those this week, such as distraction, observation, self-care, and anticipation. For now, it is enough to know that this journey will not last forever; even if it takes a while, we will get there. . . eventually. Typing out this title has given me a little pause: It has been four Sabbaths--an entire month--since I started writing this blog. There was one Sabbath of social distancing before that, so it has now been more than a month. I don’t know if that feels long or short, or if time feels like it has little meaning these days. I do know this: I’m tired, and so, I’m guessing, are you.
Everyone’s situation is unique, but I am hearing distress calls from multiple quarters about the pressures of telecommuting, of balancing full-time work with full-time parenting, of keeping up with virtual classes, and of trying to stay motivated while the world is standing still. The title of this blog is “Meanwhile, Life Goes On,” and it was originally meant to keep a tone of positivity as the world panicked. Now, it feels more like an affirmation: “The world is nuts, and this is not normal. Meanwhile, life goes on because we keep going.” But oh, we’re all so tired. And either lonely (extroverts) from social distancing or exhausted (introverts) from forced contact with our housemates. In the sheer force of effort it has taken many of us to keep things together, it can be easy for us to lose sight of the fact that, perhaps less violently than 9/11, we are still experiencing a mass trauma on that scale. Because it’s not as dramatic as planes and buildings going up in flames, it’s easy to overlook that we are legitimately under a long-term level of strain exacerbated by mundane, repetitive kinds of trauma. We need a break. When I read the story of Good Friday as recorded in the Gospel of Luke, I am always struck by Jesus’ sheer exhaustion in having the weight of the world on His shoulders. His last words, “Into Your hands, I commit my spirit!” are, in a way, just letting all of that go. Trusting His father to take it from there. If the Messiah Himself, who was God incarnate, needed to do that, how much more do we? Curiously, in John the story continues from there and we see Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea tending to Jesus’ body and stopping their work at sundown, because the Sabbath was coming. Luke describes the women who were anointing Jesus’ body stopping at sundown, even though burial was, and is, an incredibly important task. They let go of their grim task and rested on the Sabbath day. Perhaps, for all of us to have our Sabbath rest this weekend, we need to let go. To stop trying so hard. The rest of the week, there is very real work to be done and efforts to be made. We are not made to sustain that 24/7, though. There are many, many good reasons for God to prohibit work on the Sabbath day. An important one is to remind all of us that we can’t actually do everything that needs to be done. We can’t actually fix all the world’s problems through our own work. Only the power of God (often working through us, but it’s His power), can accomplish everything. I don’t know what task you need to put down. Many of us put down our paid labor for Sabbath but never put down our emotional labor. Ask God to help you search your heart for what work you need to commit to His very capable hands. Surrender your worries and your cares. This is not ignoring the existence of these weighty loads; they need to be acknowledged to be surrendered. Naming them can be painful, but by naming them, they can be let go. Every Easter weekend, I remember how Jesus rested in the tomb on Sabbath. As an immortal being who helped form the fabric of the universe, it was probably His only true rest day in His entire existence. If He needed it, so do we. Just as He said, “Into Your hands, I commit My spirit,” let us commit ours to Him. For the last three years, I have enjoyed the task of writing the narration for my church’s yearly Christmas program. Some years I’m prouder of what I write for that than others, but there are some things I keep in there year after year because the sentiment is so beautiful. One of them is a letter written on Christmas Eve in 1513 by a man named Fra Giovanni Giacondo:
“I salute you! There is nothing I can give you which you have not; but there is much, that, while I cannot give, you can take. No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take Heaven. No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present instant. Take Peace. The gloom of the world is but a shadow; behind it, yet, within our reach, is joy. Take Joy. And so . . . I greet you, with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day breaks and the shadows flee away.” Without getting too philosophical about it, I see so much in this little paragraph that can help us get through these dark times. Heaven, peace, and joy are not passive experiences, but things we have to search for earnestly. When I mentioned the Danish concept of hygge on Monday, I made note of how hygge is intentional. Taking joy isn’t about ignoring how bad things are. Happiness which is achieved by ignoring the negative has a tendency to ring hollow. Taking joy involves seeing the world as it is and choosing to focus on what good can be found instead of the darkness around it. It’s about focusing on what’s worth fighting for. Being intentional about taking joy is most important when it is most difficult to do. It’s very telling to me that Jesus, the night before embarking on the darkest day of His eternal life, deliberately carved out one last evening to enjoy with His disciples. I love that part of the story, because it shows what the stakes really were for Jesus as He headed into the crucifixion: the people He had come to cherish. He wanted to be with them one last time before the world would change forever. To take joy in the present situation, remind yourself what this is all about: We are staying home to protect human lives. I have concrete people in mind when I think about this, and I pray for them nearly daily. Some have been circulating a meme that says, “Your grandparents had to go to war; you are being asked to sit on a couch. You can do this.” What makes this different from going to war is that it’s harder to feel like you’re doing something to help while sitting still; the idea is so abstract. By thinking of a specific person you love who you don’t want to see infected, it gets more concrete. To make this passive battle of social distancing even more worth it, call that person. If this is about saving lives, actively love the people attached to those lives. Enjoy that person’s company now so that if, God forbid, they do get infected, you have no regrets. Be intentional about it. Meanwhile, take peace and joy wherever you can find it. One of the first things to freak out my most extroverted friends about this crisis was the prohibition against hugs and handshakes. As human beings, we are hard wired for touch. I don’t know how true this is, but it is commonly said that we all need 8 hugs a day for a good immune system. In several countries I’ve traveled, a kiss or two on the cheek is a standard greeting, and once you get used to it (it feels a little uncomfortable for Americans at first), even handshakes feel a little cold.
Touch is one of the five love languages, the others being words, acts of service, quality time, and gifts. The remaining four are easier to practice right now than touch, giving great opportunities to express love, but what if your love language is touch? Obviously, if you live with others, you have people you can hug. You may have to be more deliberate about that than usual. If you have pets (other than fish or reptiles), you can express and enjoy affection from those adorable little furballs. But what do you do if you live alone? (Or if no one else in your house likes being touched?) While there is no substitute for the human touch, there is value in intentionally engaging the tactile senses. It may seem juvenile, but holding a pillow or a stuffed animal close can be comforting, even for adults. On the rare occasion that my husband is gone and I’m home (normally it’s the other way around), I hold his pillow. It’s not the same, but it’s better than nothing. As a tactile person, I find it valuable to seek out textures in fabric that I find appealing. Soft, velvety, fabrics are fun in a different way than silky ones, which have a different kind of appeal than well-worn cotton. If you’ve never felt your way through your wardrobe, you might be surprised by what you discover in that exercise. Shut your eyes and run your hands across the fabric: is it smooth? Scratchy? Stretchy? Taking the time to sense all of that can be delightful, and might change the way you dress. The other thing I have always found helpful is working with yarn. Not everyone knows how to knit or crochet, but there is pleasure in letting good yarn run through your fingers. Transforming a ball of yarn into something else has a rhythm to it that is almost meditative once you get the hang of it. More than a few times I’ve coped with low-touch situations by crocheting them away. This might sound weird, but outside, I love touching the plants. This may be risky if the only outdoors you have access to are public parks, but if you can find something less traffic-y, you might enjoy experiencing nature through your fingertips. I love the feel of grass, the roughness of bark, and the softness of flowers. Cooking from scratch can be very satisfactory from a tactile point of view. There is joy in good knife work, in the meditative measuring of ingredients, and in the tending of a sauté pan. I’m not as good of a cook as these articles make me sound; I just enjoy doing it. I love all the textures involved. For dietary reasons, I don’t do it as often as I used to, but making cupcakes is a great way keep one’s hands busy while enjoying wonderful smells. In short, go out of your way this week to experience the world from a more tactile point of view. When you shower, feel the water hit your skin and breathe in the moist air. When you eat, feel the texture instead of just wolfing it down. Feel the keys under your fingers as you type for work, and enjoy all the different types of cloth you come into contact every day. My tactile hobbies aren’t for everyone; experiment and find your own thing. LEGOs? Clay? Sorting jelly beans by color? (Yes, I know someone who actually does that; you know who you are.) Find something that works for you. It could help you weather this thing for however long it lasts. Those of you living in Southern California might have noticed that we are near the beginning of a week-long storm. Those of you in Michigan would probably laugh at what we consider to be a “storm” (most of us will experience it as heavy rain), but consider this: SoCal Residents aren’t used to the kind of weather you are.
Even when I lived in Michigan, I found the rainy season more difficult to put up with than the snow storms for one simple reason: light. While snow is freezing cold and has to be shoveled off of everything, at least it reflects sunlight magnificently. It’s also fun to play with. Rain just gets everything wet, causes car crashes, and blots out the sun. Because Angelenos are not used to rain, we tend not to cope with it well. Car crashes numbers go up, and people get crabby. Fortunately, there are fewer cars on the road right now to cause crashes, but the mood problem remains: when the sun vanishes and we can’t leave our homes, what are we to do? This issue is more serious than it sounds, as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is a very real psychological condition that people suffer from. It’s less common in places like LA that are usually bathed in sunlight, but is generally characterized by lethargy and depression. Theories abound as to why this happens, but they tend to revolve around the body’s need for sunlight. Ironically, the best evidence I see for this theory is a Scandinavian country which, despite its terrible weather, is consistently ranked the happiest in the world--Denmark. Most of the official theories about why they’re so happy revolve around their progressive welfare system. (Maybe there’s something to that; not being terrified of being left homeless and destitute tends to improve one’s shot at happiness.) However, that doesn’t explain how they manage to be so happy despite their terrible weather. A few years ago, I went to Denmark, in part to figure this out, and discovered something simple but profound: culturally, they are obsessed with lighting. While American architecture and design has its moments, on the whole, we’re a fairly utilitarian culture when it comes to light. Can I use it to see? Great! Who cares if it’s pretty or not? Meanwhile, Denmark burns more candles per capita than any other country in the world and even budget hotels have nice lighting fixtures. My husband and I visited an American-themed restaurant in Copenhagen, and were amused by how they got everything about an American diner right except for a smattering of candles all over the place. When we went walking through the city, we saw candles everywhere. Taking a cue from the Danish, I burned candles constantly through the following winter, and for the first winter in years, I skipped my seasonal meltdown. For those of you who know me well, this seasonal breakdown is no joke; it tends to include the words “I hate Christmas!” and involve lots of tears. (I don’t really hate Christmas, just the standard American way of doing it.) While curing the winter blues isn’t as simple as lighting a candle, it’s an intentional step to include what the Danish call “living light” into one’s space to create what they call hygge. Hygge is an untranslatable Danish term that is all about the comfort and joy found in small things. While American versions of happiness tend to be about adventure, excitement, and really wild things, hygge is quieter. It’s about enjoying the small home comforts like a pot of stew simmering on the stove, playing a card game inside with one’s loved ones while a storm rages on outside, or baking some of the dense cake the Danish love so much. (The Danish get away with eating a lot of cake because they tend to ride their bikes to work. Every book I read on Danish culture had rapturous things to say about cake and how a salad just isn’t the same. I disagree; I find salad very comforting, but hey, to each their own!) To weather the darkness of the current storm and the isolation of social distancing, embrace hygge. Intentionally seek out happiness wherever you can make it right where you are. Light a candle, wrap a soft blanket around your shoulders, and make yourself a hot drink. I think one of the big reasons the Danish are happier, on balance, than my fellow Angelenos is because in the absence of our eternal sunshine, they are more proactive about making and seeking beautiful light anywhere they can, and with light, happiness. One of my favorite things about the Sabbath is how it defies man-made clocks and forces those of us who keep it to pay attention to nature’s clock, the sun. I believe God was very purposeful about the sunset-to-sunset time frame for the Sabbath not because clocks hadn’t been invented yet, but because He knew that someday they would be.
More than almost any other invention, clocks have allowed humanity to ignore the rhythms of nature. By superimposing man-made measures of time, we make it easier to forget the daily movements of the sun, the monthly movements of the moon, and the yearly progress of the stars. With these astronomical time keepers, we have the gentler reminders of the seasons as they change, adding both novelty and familiarity to the passage of time. The Sabbath is a great time to get back in touch with nature. I have a love-hate relationship with sunset calendars. While they are useful for planning purposes, if used wrong, they rob the beginning and end of the Sabbath of the romance of actually watching the sunset and acknowledging the God who went to the trouble of creating that magnificent painting. The gospels reveal that Jesus spent a good portion of His personal devotional time in nature. More than once, the Bible speaks of Him leaving the crowds to find a solitary place to pray, usually a mountaintop. In his teachings, especially the Sermon on the Mount, He spent almost as much time explaining nature’s lessons as those of the Scriptures. In the site where the Sermon on the Mount is thought to have taken place, there is now an elaborate church. When I saw that, it made me a little sad, because it obstructs the natural beauty of the place where Jesus taught about the sparrows and the lilies of the field. Even when you are stuck inside, the light shifts and changes throughout the day. If you’ve never taken the time to notice that, the Sabbath is a great time to take a good look at it. If you can get outside, do it! I hear the butterfly migration has started, and while I haven’t seen any here in LA yet, there’s a better chance of seeing them outside. Walking is a great way to slow down and notice the beautiful natural details that you miss when you drive, even in urban areas like mine: the flowers, the succulents, the birds, the dogs, and the grass. There are beautiful things God has made to be seen, even in the city. When I have a spare Sabbath afternoon, I love watching a good nature documentary. It blows my mind to see the great variety and complexity of God’s creation, even if most of the narration on these documentaries is given from an evolutionary point of view. Looking at footage of blue whales on their migrations or chicks leaving the nest in precarious situations fills me with awe and makes me wonder how the narrators could possibly think any of this happened by chance. Another way of enjoying nature is to drive through it. My parents are fond of taking drives on Sabbath afternoon past whatever beautiful vistas are nearby. While I found this a little boring as a kid (I would rather be hiking through the mountains than driving through them), I’m glad they did it because it taught me to love nature even while being raised in Los Angeles. These days they plan their routes carefully to avoid the dangers of catching or spreading coronavirus through public restrooms, but they still manage to deal with their cabin fever and enjoy the beautiful things God has made nearby. Whether you explore nature by car or by documentary, by window or by book, let it be a chance to admire God’s handiwork. He created an incredibly intricate masterpiece when He made the world, and it’s easy to take for granted. Take the time to appreciate it this Sabbath. |
AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
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