Sabbath

Our family celebrated a great triumph today: I had Sunday’s dinner in the crock pot (in the fridge), ready to heat up, on Saturday night!  Whoop-dee-do!  Well, it’s a baby step for me on a little personal quest.

I’ll back up a little: I’ve been thinking a lot (too much, you say?) about the idea of Sabbath lately, and how to incorporate it into my life.

If you’re up on your 10 Commandments, you may recognize this word “Sabbath” from Commandment #4, where God tells the Jewish nation to “remember the Sabbath by keeping it holy,” or, basically, work for 6 days a week, and then set the 7th day aside to rest and reconnect.

Anyway, it’s now pretty customary to go to church on Sunday, have a leisurely Sunday dinner, watch lots of football, make an easy dinner, etc.  We did this growing up, and have maintained the routine into our married-with-kids life.

But being a mom has kind of thrown me for a loop on this whole Sabbath thing.  A few weeks into the job, I started realizing, hey, moms don’t really get weekends, do they?  The kids don’t magically stop needing to eat, be clothed, and have their sticky faces washed just because it’s Saturday or Sunday!  The days and weeks all started melding together into one huge, gelatinous mass.

Time to shake things up a little.  I think God is pretty smart, knows quite a lot about us, and tells us to do stuff that’s good for us.  So if he stuck the Sabbath commandment in there with “don’t murder” and “don’t steal,” it must be worth taking seriously, right?  It’s easy for me to say, “yeah, but there must be some kind of exception for moms with toddlers.”  But there have been moms with toddlers all throughout history, and most of them had a ton more work to do than modern moms.  They still managed to make the Sabbath important in their families’ lives (without even having crockpots), so I should be able to as well.

Well, I’m not about to stop feeding the kids on Sundays or tell them they can wait for a diaper change ’til Monday (don’t worry).  But I’m trying to take little steps to organize our week so that we can feel “caught up” on Sunday, instead of scrambling to complete things then.  It would be pretty fantastic to (someday) actually be caught up enough to be able to have people over after church or for Sunday dinner instead of having the house in chaos and no clue what’s for lunch.

Babysteps.

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