Sevening

What does it mean to enter into Sabbath rest, a custom the early church sometimes called "Sevening"? Our lives have become so heavily scheduled that the whole notion of a "Sabbath" seems as foreign to us now as it did when God first introduced the Hebrew people to the concept. How can we take time/make time for a weekly, soak-in-the-Scriptures "Sevening" when so much of life threatens to "deep-six" us?

"On the seventh day God rested and drew breath" (Exodus 31:17 NJB).

"Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work - you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns" (Exodus 20:8-10).

For most of us the suggestion that we should or even could clear our calendars once a week brings cynical smiles and/or wishful sighs. A whole day devoted to rooting ourselves in time and place, a time set aside for quietly and carefully landscaping our souls instead of bulldozing our way through the personal, economic, and professional stumps we face the rest of the week sounds almost frivolous. But as we have increasingly lost the art of "Sevening," our lives have become more and more wound up, wounded and wrecked. It is not just America's urban zombies who live in overscheduled, overmedicated, overmediated states...