That’s how life seems right now (full, that is, and not with penguins... you'll see later). But don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a post to try and make myself seem really important or anything. It’s just that I’ve been thinking about how dense things have felt right now. By dense, I mean spending a lot of time thinking about things like ‘how God is at work in this person’s life and what you could do to lead them well’ or ‘create a birthday present for your little brother that will make up for the ways you haven’t loved him enough this year’ or ‘ponder the topic of patience in the kingdom of God and produce something that will speak to students’ or ‘what would God have for me in this next season of my life?’
It’s just not the kind of things that you can bs without some nasty serious consequences (‘I dunno, it just kinda sounded cool to spend this next season of my life trying to start the first penguin synchronized swimming colony…’). So you can imagine it sounds a little strange when one of my coworkers asks me when I want to go to lunch with her to talk about graduate school and I tell her ‘how about the week after next?’ and then she laughs at me because no one, not even architects and surely not the office mule, plan casual lunches two weeks in advance. My bad.
But what happens when you start operating at a high level of ‘density’ in your life and then you go through seasons where things are less ‘dense’? What if you’ve based how you function in relationships on your ‘denser’ seasons? What if you’ve started to have your identity rooted in how you function in your ‘denser’ seasons? What if you start believe that people love you only because of what you do and accomplish?
Then what?
I guess that’s why it’s so important to keep a Sabbath, or a day when you yell a loud ‘NO!’ to those thoughts that tell you that doing equals being and you whisper a quiet ‘yes’ to a God who says that you are loved before and after you accomplish anything. Where all you do is ask God how you should be in his presence and his love for a day.
Question is, when is my next Sabbath?
