Pause

 It's the Sabbath! There's a word I heard recently (maybe even on the blog I'm listening to) that is hard to describe the meaning. Basically, you suddenly hear about something constantly because you start studying it even though you hadn't heard much about it before. The question then is whether it's just more recognized or whether perception has changed turning thoughts and things into that subject. I'm not sure what the answer is, but since I started studying the Sabbath things have been popping up randomly. This weekend, I helped to lead a confirmation retreat. During some downtime, someone put on an episode of "Word Girl". It's a kid's cartoon about words. 

Each episode features a different word and throughout the episode examples of real life are shown of the focused word. You'll never guess what the word reminded me of! What? How did you guess?! The word was "pause". The whole world had paused, frozen as if someone had hit a pause button on the world. That's pretty much what happened on the show since the bad guy wanted to eat some almost expired cheese and figured pausing the rest of the world would give him a chance to eat his cheese in time. But I digress... 

Shabbot means to stop. The Sabbath is a time to stop, to press the stop button on the world so that we can spend some time settling in with God rather than being distracted by the world. I don't think this means we have to cut out everyone. Afterall, sometimes experiencing God is through the experiences we have with others, like spending time in worship or having a family meal. So, when we think about the Sabbath, we need to pause the things of the world that are distracting us from God and settle in with the things that draw us closer to Him. 

I'm still working on figuring out what those things are for me. But, one thing I have learned during this Sabbath journey is that writing to process things brings me closer to God because it helps me figure out what my understanding is. So, hopefully, this will be a Sabbath habit I can keep.

As I think about the Sabbath as a time to pause in order to get closer to God, I am reminded that lent will soon be here. I haven't focused deeply on doing much during lent lately. With covid, it seemed like everything was paused already for a bit! But, this year I want to focus (see how my word is helping me?!) more during lent by pausing something to help bring me closer to God. I'm not sure what that is, but when I figure it out I will let you know. 

I have to wonder, with my word choices being the same, how the Sabbath and lent are different. They definitely have similarities in that something is paused for the purpose of helping us focus more on God. But, I think there is so much more worth exploring for both things and I hope I'm able to during the next few months.

Blessings,

Jennifer