Discover The Rhythms Of The Daily Office And Sabbath Series

Discover the Rhythms of the Daily Office and Sabbath

Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, prt. 6

Wildwind Community Church

November 14, 2010

David Flowers

Monday through Friday. Get out of bed. Grab your morning coffee, and maybe some breakfast. Shower. Get dressed. Hopefully brush your teeth somewhere in there. Then out the door to work, to school, to get the kids where they need to go. Then home, dinner, maybe a chore or two, maybe a little TV or Facebook, then off to bed. You can customize this however you need to, but what I have just said probably pretty much captures the rhythms of American life for most Americans. But that’s just the weekdays. Let’s get the weekends into this too.

Saturday – Try to maybe sleep in, but probably wake up close the same time you always do during the week, much to your frustration. Maybe take a shower, maybe skip it – heck, it’s the weekend. Grab some coffee and breakfast somewhere, get teethbrushing in somewhere, then off you go. Where to? The answer, of course, is wherever the kids require you to take them. Band, sports, choir, robotics, the art fair, dance, gymnastics, and wherever else you are running to at such a pace that you almost have no choice but to stop and grab some fast food somewhere, despite your awareness that it’s terrible for you and the kids, and that you don’t really have the money to do this. Run, run, run, run, run, run, run, get home, catch a little TV, and then learn at the last minute that there’s another practice or event your child has to be at in 20 minutes. It’s 40 minutes away. Off you go. You get out there and it’s canceled. Even worse possibility – it’s NOT canceled, but it is almost half over now with your being late and all, so you sit in the parking lot listening to the radio, trying to kill some time. Your child comes out to the car after practice and there’s some poor kid whose parent hasn’t shown up yet to get them. You thank the coach and express your appreciation by assuring him you’ll take care of the abandoned child. You make a few calls and finally catch the parent at home, who has just awakened from a nap and can’t be out to pick the kid up for 30 minutes, spends the next ten minutes telling you how overwhelmed and busy they are, and asks if you can drive the kid home. So you do, because at least this way you know how much longer you’ll be involved in this whole affair. This child’s parent, obviously, is a wild card. You get back home and realize you haven’t touched your honey-do list yet, so you knock a couple things off of it – until the phone rings and it’s another couple inviting you to dinner and a movie. You haven’t said yes to an invitation in a while, and you’re totally exhausted and don’t want to accept this one either, but you and your spouse agree you need the time out, and you don’t want the other couple to think you hate them, so you agree. You’re supposed to meet them at their house in four hours. You spend the next 3 hours and 57 minutes nailing down babysitting. By the time the sitter gets there, you just want to hit the sack for the day. But you show up 30 minutes late to your friends’ house and off you go to enjoy a wonderful evening . That is, assuming the babysitter doesn’t call and announce that your child has a fever. You enjoy your time out, but in the back of your mind the whole time you are a) wondering how the kids are doing; b) trying to figure out when you’ll be home and how much you’ll end up paying the sitter; c) trying to stop thinking about how the last three times you have gone out the sitter has called and announced that the baby has a fever, or won’t stop throwing up, or whatever else has caused you to have to call off the whole night and go home early.

So there – that’s Saturday. This is fun, shall we do Sunday?! Get up, get your coffee, get in shower, grab some breakfast, brush teeth in there somewhere, head to church, go out after with people you love, even though you couldn’t afford it yesterday, and you definitely can’t afford to do it again today, only this time you actually WANT to go out. Head home, and then it’s pretty much exactly like Saturday, except somewhere around 8 pm as you’re starting to think about the kids heading toward bed, you ask them if all their homework is finished, since you asked them to do it yesterday. They look at your blankly and go, “Huh?” So you help kids with homework for the next two hours, and get them to bed 30 minutes later. You look at your spouse and they look back at you, and you shake hands and agree to pretend it was sex. You’re just too tired, and at least one of you (if not both) is tense about work tomorrow, crabby about where the weekend went, frustrated about critical things you needed to get done that didn’t get done, and speaking of that, you suddenly become aware that laundry is one of those things, and now neither of you has any underwear for tomorrow. If you’re lucky, you negotiate who’s going to throw some laundry in. If you’re not so lucky, that becomes your last irritated argument for the weekend. One of you hits the rack, and the other (whoever drew the short straw on the laundry) falls in bed an hour later. Thus ends our Sunday. Tomorrow we’re going to – well, we’re gonna get up and start the whole thing over again.