Two weeks ago, I got to hear
some of what sabbatical was for you. Today I want to share with you some of
what sabbatical was for me.
Sabbath and sabbatical, is
time stepping outside of working for the “food that perishes,” and instead deliberately
seeking the “food that endures for eternal life.” - which is tricky since this food you can’t work for; this
food can only be received.
Receiving this eternal food,
this life-giving, thirst-quenching, hunger-satisfying food is not something we
can work at; it’s not something we can do. The most we can do is pay attention.
And maybe stop long enough to notice that the God who came down from
heaven and gives life to the world is right
here in life alongside us.
I am the bread of life, Jesus said.
How can we receive you, Jesus?
You all lived in questions
this season. Questions that guided
your reflection and gave you a lens to watch your life for signs of God’s
presence.
As it so happens, two
questions turned out to be significant for me over this sabbatical. They had been important for my
children, first.
Last year, when Maisy
started kindergarten she was understandably nervous and afraid. I told her before she went to school
the first day that God would have a surprise for her, and she needed to watch
for it. At the end of the day I
would ask her what that surprise was.
And then I prayed, Please God,
give her a surprise today. (Don’t leave me hanging here!)
That first day she came home
with a paper frog on her head and a huge smile on her face and she said, Mommy you were right! I did have a surprise!
And she proceeded to regale me with tales of some new friend, a special art
project, a moment of bravery, an unexpected treat.
Each day after that, as she
came home with an answer to the question, How
did God surprise you today? I began to grow more confident asking the
question, and she never doubted she’d have an answer.
God really would meet her
each day.
Could she and I practice
noticing it?
The question became a staple
for Maisy, and she began bringing it up unprompted, so that by the middle of
the schoolyear it was her practice to bounce up to me after school with her
backpack on and say, Mommy, guess what my
surprise was today?
So this year, when school
started a third of the way into my sabbatical, we revived the question for both
kids.
And it was not always easy. Some
days we’d really have to search for the surprise, hearing events of the day
laid out in excruciating detail before one of us would eventually say, Aha! There it is!, Other days there
were so many moments of unexpected grace it was not possible to name just one
or two.
After a few days, adjusting
to new classrooms, missing friends, remembering times when we saw someone
lonely or teased, feeling lonely or worried ourselves, another question joined
the first, and it was, “Who did God bring across your path that needed kindness
today?”
And so every school day
ended with, How did God surprise you
today? And who did God show you needed kindness today?
Asking these two questions
assumes that God is living and active in our lives already, and our job is to
pay attention. It also assumes that God is inviting us
to be part of what God is doing in the world, and our job is to pay
attention.
This second question, we
found, is a little harder to answer.
Who today needed kindness and
love? This kind of paying
attention means looking beyond yourself, and it’s sometimes uncomfortable.
Sometimes we’d look back and
we did in fact show kindness – we recognized the person in the moment and we
responded – listened to God’s prompting and in courage, reached out somehow
beyond ourselves to meet them right then.
Other times, more often,
perhaps, we’d see them after the fact and realize we didn’t notice them at the
time, or didn’t let it sink in, or held back from responding for whatever
reason.
Sometimes we’d realize later
that someone we had already shared a conversation with, laughed with, sat with,
or walked home next to may have been that person, and without even trying to,
we had shared kindness or love and been part of what God was doing.
And once or twice, we saw
ways that one of us was that person and someone saw us and shared our place,
and showed us kindness and love.
I was sharing these experiences
with my spiritual director- whom I saw every other week throughout my
sabbatical. I told her how
meaningful it was to help my kids think through their days, to watch them pay
attention. To see them see Jesus.
I had also just spent a half
hour joyfully sharing experiences of spontaneous conversations, moments of
giving, how available I felt to people and how open I felt to my life’s bumping
up against others.
She smiled at me and said,
“I wonder what it would be like for you if you asked yourself the same questions you ask your children each day?”
When she said that my mind
was flooded with images of how those two questions had lived in me over the
past several weeks, and nearly every day – even without deliberately asking
them – I had standout experiences of being surprised by God in little ways, and
coming face to face with people to whom I could show kindness and love, (which
were often the same moments).
Rejoice, again I say rejoice!
The Lord is near.
You are the bread of life,
Jesus.
You are there, feeding us in
all times and places.
Do we notice?
Here’s the thing about Sabbath
and sabbatical – it’s not a long term plan, a permanent state. It’s a step outside the regular pattern
on purpose. What I mean is, we
don’t live in Sabbath time in order to always
live in Sabbath time. We live in
Sabbath time so that we might notice.
So that we have had some practice
tasting, hearing, seeing, noticing, undistracted by work and all the things we
do that give us value and make us feel good about ourselves and fill our
minutes with stuff and our space with busyness and our minds with worry.
We try it out in
stripped-down mode, a low tech, acoustic version of life for a short time so
that we can get familiar with the tune, familiar enough that in the long haul we
can pick it up and hear it still, underneath the layers of relentless noise and
constant feedback.
Sabbath and sabbatical
remind us that God is with us.
They remind us that life is a gift. By saying a great big strong NO to lots of things for one day, or three months, or two intentional hours, we begin to see that we can say no to
more things and still be ok, maybe be more ok.
Sabbath and sabbatical teach
us to rejoice because they help us recognize how much there is to rejoice about
when we’re not rushing past it all.
They teach us to bring everything, in both pleading and gratitude, to
God, because they show us that God is already there in it with us. The bread of life, giving life to the
world.
How did God surprise you today? Who today needs kindness and love?
So here are some of my answers. On my sabbatical, here are just a few of
the times I felt God surprise me – which is to say, times I noticed:
- - Sitting across from third graders, one at a time, once a week, on a short chair with my knees in the air, in the school library, listening to them tell me in their own words all about a book they’d just finished reading.
- - Walking home from dropping my kids off at school and chatting with a mom I know a little bit, in a conversation that turned real and bumped up against grief and loss, and being able to say, Do you want to get a cup of coffee? and spending the next two hours listening and sharing and crying and talking without anywhere else to be but completely and fully there.
- - Moving clay beneath my hands silently, my body focused and mind relaxed, listening to others talk around me like water washing over me, feeling hidden and incognito and lost in the rhythm of the work with no agenda for mastery or completion.
- - Inviting some tired and busy moms over for lunch, setting a beautiful table in the sunshine with nice dishes and a tea and cookie pairing for dessert, and watching them settle in and laugh till their sides ached and stay two and a half hours longer than they had meant to.
- - Walking out on sand flats where the tide receded from the rocky shores of an island in the Puget sound, hunting for shells with a plastic bucket in one hand and my daughter’s hand in the other, sprayed by clams and smelling saltwater and eventually being nudged back to shore by the returning water creeping up around us and filling in our footprints
- - coming home from a day of site seeing to a night of good food and good wine with friends who normally live a continent away but for this one week are right here under our own roof
- - holding my baby nephew and watching his eyes droop closed and his body relax as he falls asleep in my arms
- - Starting a time warp of a day wandering the house with a cup of coffee and pulling out our old, falling apart wedding album from its box onto the floor next to the replacement album never filled, and hours later standing, stiff and achy, and throwing on a sweatshirt and hat for a joy-filled dog walk that came upon the children leaving school, and ended with all of us strolling home together to sit down and see the story of mom and dad’s wedding day – maybe for the first time – all without ever really officially changing out of my pajamas
- - Creeping up on a napping buffalo on a hillside in Yellowstone Park
- - Peering down from a snowy mountain peak off the Beartooth highway at a shimmering winding river far below,
- - Looking over at my husband’s face as he sings along with the radio and we’ve got nothing but road ahead and road behind and vast emptiness all around.
- - reading with my son
- - drawing with my daughter
- - crying with my sister
- - laughing with my mother
- - Listening to music – on purpose, not just in the background.
- - Falling asleep with a soft, snoring puppy nuzzled against me.
It’s not that these things are out of the
ordinary, though I suppose in one way many of them become out of the ordinary
for many of us, because these kinds of things require surrendering to time,
instead of fighting with it. They
are sabbatical/Sabbath gifts – received when we’re willing to slow down and
accept them.
But it’s not that the surprises from God in my sabbatical
days were anything extraordinary. It’s
simply that I noticed them.
I
looked at them and gratitude caught in my throat. I felt the grace of them.
One of my favorite things
Frederick Buechner ever said is, “Listen
to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less
than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy
and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key
moments, and life itself is grace."
(From Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation)
He’s talking about filling up on the bread of
life.
Sitting down to the banquet of it all and
unabashedly eating, unselfconscious and unconcerned with whether you belong
there, or where else you need to be at the moment, or if it’s ok to ask for
seconds. Just enjoying. Tasting each bite. Feeling the thank you well up in your eyes. Bumping shoulders with the person next to you and sensing
yourself a part of it all.
Thank you for my sabbatical.
Thank you for the chance to practice living in
the questions.
Thank you for the extended time to tune back in
to the grace so I can better listen for it every day.
Thank you for sharing Sabbath and sabbatical with
each other, so that together we can continue to ask,
When this week did you taste the bread of life?
Where did you see Jesus?
How will God surprise you today?
And who today needs kindness and love?
May we pay attention. May we notice and receive.
Amen.
1 comment:
Beautiful. 10 years later. Reading this was my sweet surprise today.
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