Hurry Up & Rest

Honor the Sabbath
and keep it Holy.

This past weekend as Victoria, Griffin and I sat in traffic (see post below), we were often alongside the three 250-horsepower motors dangling off the back of "The Exterminator." I thought of my great-grandmother, "Mama Logue," who fished with a cane pole in the cow pond of her Edgefield County, South Carolina farm. There is such a radical difference between the way she fished and menacing lines of the high performance fishing boat we saw making its way down I-95.

Now I often known enough to know what I don't know (don't try that five times fast) and in this case I know I don't know anything about the world of professional tournament fishing. The Exterminator is a fishing boat sponsored by a pest control company and in its world of tournament fishing, the 750 horses pushing the boat may not only common, but needed. And yet I couldn't escape the fact that we drove more than 17 hours to spend Friday evening and all day Saturday hanging out with old friends. And we have also vacationed so hard that we came home needing a vacation from our vacation.

In the archives is the sermon Come Away and Rest which notes,

Working more is not better and workaholics cost an estimated $150 billion per year through health-related problems. This is not a problem in our nation alone. In Japan they have coined a term Karoshi, meaning death from overwork. The 60-70 hour work weeks in Japan cause 10,000 workers a year to die on the job from Karoshi. Overwork is also listed by an association of matrimonial lawyers as one of the top four causes of divorce.

Being a workaholic was a capital crime in ancient Israel as those who broke the sabbath were to be punished by death (that'll put the brakes on a lot of folks who say they don't want to interpret the Bible, but just live what it says). There weren't loopholes either. The day of rest was for you and your servants and the alien living in the land.

God knows we need rest and not just the exhausting kind of recreation. Rather we crave the re-creation that comes from letter your body idle and your mind wander. So our bodies need us to balance the get-to-the-fish-faster sort of recreation exemplified by The Exterminator, with some real down time.

Pat Gohman sent out the prayer below as the header on this week's list of prayer requests for the Diocese of Georgia:

Thank you, gracious God, for all that fills our lives with joy: the love of family and friends, the comfort of our homes, the challenge of work, and the delight of leisure. Forgive us for too often we have taken all these for granted, failing to see them as your gifts. Stretch our understanding, that we may know our lives in the perspective of your sovereign authority. Teach us to live in the world with faithfulness to your intention for the world, and to be at home wherever your spirit leads us, through Jesus Christ your faithful witness. Amen.

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor King of Peace Episcopal Church

Honor the Sabbath
and keep it wholely.