"Just Let Me Get Through..."

We have a lot going on at St. Peter's right now. We just launched Good Book Club and resumed Sunday School for all ages. A related Thursday evening lecture series begins next week. We inaugurated the Indian Rock Society last Sunday. The annual fall pledge campaign is coming in a few weeks. And we're going to officially begin a feasibility study in October on the subject of a possible capital campaign in 2012.

That's just at St. Peter's. In addition, I'm helping with the bishop search and transition process, chairing our Congregational Development Commission, helping launch a residential intern program for college graduates in Providence, and chairing the diocese's strategic planning task force. Oh, and I have a two-year old.

My guess is that your life is similarly packed. It's autumn. It seems to be par for the course.

But as my friend the Rev. John Ohmer recently observed in a piece he wrote, all this busyness has generated a strange, low-level irritability. It's the malaise, the grumpiness that comes from feeling powerless to change your situation, the feeling that you just have to power on. John refers to it as the "Let Me Just Get Through ___________" attitude.

You know, "Let me just get through this big meeting...let me just get through this conference...let me just get through this event...let me just get through this week, this weekend..." and THEN everything will be okay, everything'll settle down...

Uh-huh. Like there's no next thing to get through, nothing else on the horizon, no "next thing" to "get through." We're kidding ourselves when we say this. What is that famous definition of insanity...to do the same thing over and over and expect different results? Yeah, that's us when we say to ourselves, "just let me just get through _____ ..."

There's something I've come to realize, through the wisdom of Scripture and the example of friends like John. When we have the least time available, that is when we need Sabbath the most. When we are the most stressed, the busiest, the most frantic, that's when we need the day of holy rest the most.

On Sunday the reading from Exodus will be the Ten Commandments. "Yeah, yeah, I've heard 'em before," we say to ourselves. "Thou shalt not this and that and the other thing. Blah."

But tucked in the middle of this overly familiar bunch of directives from God is the one that we modern people violate the most. The command to observe a holy day of rest each and every week. To honor one day in which we just stop. Stop trying. Stop working. Stop moving so fast.

Right now, with everything swirling around me like a tornado, God's invitation to pure, holy rest one day a week is like music. It's exactly what I need to be healthy and whole. It's exactly what we all need, because we are not created to constantly make/do/act/go. We're made to sit in God's presence, to bask in God's life-giving love, to be rejuvenated by the one who on the seventh day of creation modeled holy rest.

So are we going to continue to live out Einstein's definition of insanity, or are we going to listen to God and do something differently?