Leisure or Sabbath?

“Leisure and sabbath have much in common: They are both personally restorative, enjoyable, nonutilitarian, and playful. Though sabbath and leisure delightfully overlap, there are discernible differences. Leisure is a matter of personal choice; sabbath is divinely mandated (Exod. 20:8-11). Leisure is usually perceived as avocational – something we do alongside our vocation; sabbath is vocational – part of the response of our entire person to the call of God. Leisure is usually directed to self, while sabbath, which is also personally satisfying, is directed ultimately to the pleasure of God. Both are aesthetic, but leisure tends toward hedonism while sabbath invites contemplation. Sometimes we must admit that leisure is more of a diversion from sabbath than an experience of it.”
- The Equipping Pastor, Stevens and Collins, 1993, p. 86

Eugene on the Song of Songs

"All pastoral conversation is a conversation between lovers"

(Five Smooth Stones..., Eugene Peterson, p. 44)

Ecclesiastes

"So I commend the enjoyment of life, because nothing is better for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany him in his work all the days of the life God has given him under the sun" (Eccl. 8:15).

Accepting our human limitations as the gift of God is a difficult task. Look at all the injustice around us! How the poor are mistreated, and millions die in war and famine and meaninglessness. We are bent on fixing the world, and rightly so, for that is God’s work that he is already doing.

But we are tempted to leave behind what it means to be human – finding simple and good pleasure in life – and instead trade it for "super"-human existence, in the guise of self-sacrifice and cross-bearing, that leaves us acting and behaving like gods who "really" know how the world should work, and do our damnedest to see our vision become a reality. Broken families and burned out pastors and church congregations are our legacy. Few know what it means to be human. And then the justice and peace-making we so passionately pursue, though a crucial and central part of being human, not only does not deliver the oppressed, but we are, in fact, never delivered ourselves.

My reaction to Job 38-42

What can really be said in the face of meaningless suffering? We question life and God, and he and life turn and question us instead. “Who are you,” he asks. “You act like, and strive for knowledge, as if you were god, but you are not. Consider my unfathomable ways.” Is it impossible to ask the meaning of life, for it is beyond our reach? Is our control of our lives only an illusion, just as we fool ourselves into thinking we can control the world? If you believe yourself to be suffering unjustly and meaninglessly, perhaps you have bought into the illusion that you can determine and order your life by righteousness, instead of living by trust. Perhaps you are being tempted to indict God.

Ultimate salvation does not rest with us, for we cannot even save ourselves day to day. Science advances, we live like kings, but cancer laughs at our impotence, and there is no peace in the land, no matter how much we believe in the power of the United Nations. The more we appear to succeed, according to the voices we prefer to listen to, the more believable the illusion becomes, and the more tempted we are to sit in judgement upon God when he won’t get with our program and vindicate our godhood.

What is Job's journey? He admits he has spoken of things he did not understand. Does he include his first and best reaction in 1:21 and 2:10? Perhaps he did not speak wrongly in those cases, but did not really understand. A change of knowledge has happened in his encounter with God. Perhaps his suffering was not ultimately meaningless, as his inner being has been brought into congruity with his words – “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.” (1:21)

Wanting to Read Dune

The more I do Hebrew, and consequently the more I read, "in my father's house," which tends to crop up often, I remember all the talk about "houses" in Frank Herbert's Dune.

Not for the last time do I wonder whether I should have done English as my undergrad and then wrote/read/taught fiction.