A Lion's Legacy ...

Perhaps it is my age, or the occasional health bumps I seem to encounter more frequently these days, but it certainly seems to me as if there has been quite a bit of “death” going around: James Whitmore (movie actor), Ricardo Montalban (Fantasy Island), Farrah Fawcett (Charlie’s Angels), Michael Jackson (King of Pop), Don Hewitt (60 minutes Creator), and most recently Teddy Kennedy (Lion of the Senate).  When famous people fall, the media makes news to cover the passing.  Media itself seems to become the story, as almost every facet of the deceased person’s life is explored, relived, and commented on, seldom by anyone qualified to do so.  I guess famous death makes good ratings for “news” networks.

What interests me more than the sadness we all feel when someone leaves this mortal plain, is the human tendancy to revise how we feel about them now that they are “gone”.  It is a characteristic almost universally employed to edit ourselves when speaking of the departed.  We tend to show them more mercy.  We tend to speak about them with less negatives, and focus our conversations more around their positive contributions.  When someone passes away who we think “deserved it”, rather than punch up the positives, we simply do not speak about them at all.  It seems in death, even our enemies get some level of reprieve from us.

But why are we generally so much kinder to those who are now unable to appreciate our kindness?  Why is it we only seem to grant mercy to those who are beyond our ability to receive it?  I wonder if it is easier to show love to those who are unable to return it, than to risk showing love to those who may wish to reject it.  But isn’t this the basis for almost all important regret in our lives?  We regret far less the things we did not do, than the sentiments we did not convey to those we love.  Those family members, or close friends we have lost, would we not all wish for at least one more day with them, to tell them how we really felt; to say goodbye better than we did, or perhaps at all.  Yet this lesson goes unlearned with those we still see every day.

It is as if we speak about the dead in only favorable terms, citing all the good they accomplished, in order to convince God that this person was a good candidate for heaven.  Or maybe, more to the point, to convince ourselves that despite our own evil, we may still be spoken of well, once we pass on.  Though the sum of a person’s deeds has no bearing at all on where their final disposition will be.  It only matters whether they had accepted God’s outstretched gift for them or not.  Their deeds, whether seemingly good, or seemingly evil, do not matter against that all important question.

Do we whitewash our memories of the dead the same way we do our speech?  While alive, Michael Jackson was strongly criticized regarding his skin color (was it truly a disease or did he just pay to get it that way), he was condemned by many for the allegations of child molestation (multiple accusations, most resolved with mega-payments and silence), and for his continued relevance as a performer (for which his comeback tour was scheduled to try to change this perception once again).  To say he was controversial was an understatement.  Now dead, the most common tag line associated with him, is the profound self-examination he penned … “man in the mirror”.  Mike did much to bring black music into the mainstream, and donated tons of money to various charities.  He was generous, talented, and reserved.  All of this was true during his life, but only since his death, do we focus on it to the exclusion of all the former controversy.

This week it was Ted Kennedy who fell, losing his battle with brain cancer.  While alive his foibles always accompanied any interview he gave, or any perception offered of him by the pundits.  You could not talk about educational reform legislation, or health care reform without mentioning Ted Kennedy.  This would be followed closely by his history of drinking too much, womanizing, or his greatest folly Chappaquiddick.  His silence during the Anita Hill hearings on sexual harassment was deafening (I presume a subject too close to home).  But for all his foibles, indeed for all his human weakness, his accomplishments and more importantly to me his pursuits are worthy of his title – Lion of the Senate.  He fought for the poor, the disenfranchised, and those in need.  I remember another lion in history with similar concerns who may well have been his example on these fronts.

It is not that I choose to ignore all the mistakes Ted made in his life.  I acknowledge them.  We are ALL plagued by the weakness and addictive power that evil would hold over us.  But despite what may be the evil in our very nature, Ted took a stand for those who had no other advocate.  It is NOT popular to fight for the poor in our society.  The very nature of special interests is to use money to obtain favor.  The poor have none.  It is the very nature of power to subject those less fortunate into increasing the power of those who hold it.  The poor have no power, they are in fact, those who are subjected. 

Ted fought for the poor.  He fought to improve their education and thus give them hope for a brighter future.  He fought to bring them health care, and therefore liberate them from the working slavery of being bound to insurance companies to cover the costs of unplanned catastrophe in our lives.  Ted did something that was truly not in his own personal interests, but in the interests of those who had the greatest of needs.  In this alone I believe he earned his title.  A lion who fought to protect, who roared against the status quo, and the silent bigotry that chooses to ignore the poor, or make their conditions even worse.  Ted was a singular force, pricking the conscience of those who stood with him in the Senate to remember their charge – to represent those back home who have no other voice.  This is the legacy of the lion I will remember most.

This is the beauty of our humanity.  We do not need to have achieved perfection to make an impact on our world.  Ted was far from perfect.  There are a million things you could accuse him of, most would be true.  He was not a saint.  But in his life, he periodically took up the banner of the saints, and did what was not only right, it was remarkable.  Though far from perfection of his character, he took up the battle of perfection, and waged war to benefit those with the greatest of needs.  I admire him, for not just succumbing to his lower nature, for not just throwing in the towel on himself, but for choosing to fight on despite any personal failures.  While he was not a perfect vessel, the fight for the poor, is the very example of the life of Christ Himself.  We should ALL be remembered as such.

God looks for those who are willing to follow Him.  He looks for those who will allow His values to penetrate their hearts, and minds, and very existence.  He looks to inspire passion for helping others back into our nature.  So few heed His calls.  So many fall to expediency and the pursuit of wealth.  So many choose the easy path.  But I would rather be numbered with Ted, and with David, and with Moses.  None of them perfect, but all of them used by God to accomplish great things.  I feel a great loss with the passing of Ted Kennedy, not for myself, but for everyone who like me has no more an advocate in government.  He was not the senator from my state, but was every bit my senator.  He stood for me, and stood up for me.  I only hope that when my life is ended, my legacy will include not only all the evil I have embraced, but a record of striving for others, and the mercy of the God who loved even me …

Garion's Hope ...

There once was a boy, a very special boy, full of life, bold, unafraid to become your friend – undaunted by the prejudice that comes with age, genuine and engaged.  He was a picture of child-like love that our Savior so longs to see in each of us.  He did not mind being the center of attention.  He was imperfect, but so loved that he was easy to forgive.  One evening last week he went to bed near the comfort of his mother, but he will no more wake in this world as we know it.  We who he left behind are in shock.  He was only 8.

Above all other tragedy in this world, nothing is more painful than the loss of a very young child.  It will rip the tears from your eyes.  The thought of losing SO much potential, the sadness of missing so much undiscovered life, how do we find a way to continue on in the face of so great a loss?  Inevitably comes the question of God’s character; if He exists, how could He allow this?  Garion was a Christian, a believer, his family devout followers of Christ – how does such a random travesty befall servants of the Most High?  We weep at our loss, and find it hard to take comfort in knowing we will see Garion again in a perfect world.  We believe in this hope, but it seems so pale in comparison to the loss which is so ever present.  How are we to hope?  How does God?

From the viewpoint of the Father we are ALL very young children.  We have no idea of the potential we have yet to discover.  Our limited view is so blind we are unable to see what we could become.  Does God hope for us to turn to Him while we find ourselves turning away?  When we pass from this world does our passing bring sorrow in Heaven at the choices we made to ignore our potential, to deny our eternal destiny, and to choose consistently our path to eternal non-existence?  How does God go on?  His sorrow is not confined to an immediate memory such as ours.  He feels the loss of a life across all of space and time; the painful lack of an existence that chose to avoid Him.  When a person such as this passes from the earth, they seal a fate which God cannot overturn – the sorrow must be magnified by an order of magnitude in the heart of our Father.

While we sometimes spend our time questioning God about the tragedy that impacts our lives, He spends His time worrying about the tragedy we choose to continue to inflict on ourselves.  Our perspective on the passing of a young child is dwarfed by His view of the passing of anyone who has chosen to reject Him permanently.  Sorrow is not unique to humanity.  Nor do we have a patent on deep despair.  Heaven rejoices at one soul repenting and turning to Christ – the converse is also true – Heaven weeps at the loss of a single soul who rejects all invitations of love. 

Our sadness and grief center like most things in our lives, around ourselves.  Even our grief tends to be based in self.  Not so with God, He weeps for the loss of children who will never get to know the source of all love.  He weeps over souls who make a consistent, determined set of choices away from Himself.  He need not weep for Garion.  Garion is destined to sit on His knee.  Garion is destined to run up on the pulpits of Heaven and distract the speakers of the corridors of perfection.  Garion had the heart of the Father within him.  The love of God showed through the heart of Garion, plain to see for anyone who looked.  So Garion’s fate is not one to question.  God knows our sorrow, but finds it hard to weep, knowing He will see Garion again so very soon.  Weeping is saved for those who have not this certainty.

I am not well liked by the family of Garion.  His parents and grandparents do not view me with sympathetic eyes.  My history with them is far from what I would prefer, and confounds my understanding.  It is like having a brother who simply chooses not to embrace you no matter what you would do, or say.  Were heredity or environment hurtles not to be overcome I dare say Garion would have avoided me at the least, or hated me as I would have expected, just because everything around him would have led him to do so.  But he did neither.  Garion talked with me, shared with me, and treated me as any Christian would despite anything around him.  That was Garion, blissfully unaware, and completely Christian.

Maybe that is why his passing cuts me to the core.  Maybe that is why I feel as though I lost one of my own children.  I shared very little of his life, saw him only briefly, spoke to him less times than I could count on fingers and toes.  But my grief is more than I would have imagined.  Perhaps it is confounded because I am unable to share it with his family.  Perhaps the real tragedy is that even in the death of Garion I must be divided from my brother, his father.  It causes me to wonder what is so inordinately different between his family and myself; what is so important, as to keep Christian brothers from free association?  I find it hard to remember a priority worthy of continuing our separation.

People often speak of the dead as if they knew what they would have wanted, or would have said in a given situation.  I will not dishonor Garion in this way.  No one can know the thoughts of the heart of another human being.  And God alone can judge.  But I do make comment on the life and the love that I witnessed in Garion.  I am humbled by his openness.  I am debased by my own pride when I view his child-like unconditional acceptance.  I would not dare to say what Garion would have wanted, but I dare to believe his example of loving is worthy to hold up.  I cannot presume to know what Garion might have said, but I know his words were never cutting, never critical, never laced with innuendo or malice.  His words were simple, direct, inquisitive, and appreciative. 

I accept my distance from Garion’s family as the last thing I would ever wish on them would be to add to their grief, especially now.  But I long for a day when there is no bitter past to remember.  I long for a time when the priorities that now separate Christian brothers dissolve in the presence of love, nevermore to reemerge.  I long to see Garion again on streets with no name, paved with cement made of gold.  My grief is consoled by the assurance of this hope.  I wonder who consoles our Father as He watches and witnesses the pain we continue to choose to inflict on ourselves.  I place my hope in a day when evil exists no more.  I put my faith in our Lord that He will continue to push evil out of my life and save me to uttermost.  And I will honor Garion’s hope and extend my acceptance, my apologies, my forgiveness, and my love to his family – and with the help of the Lord, to everyone I encounter.  In this I believe I share Garion’s hope …

Fools of Us All ...

Is it fortune, or mortality that doth make fools of us all?  Death is the great equalizer, it spares not the young nor the old, the rich nor the destitute, the loved and the unloved.  All of man’s wisdom terminates at the grave.  Many theories exist in many belief systems about existence beyond the grave, but all of them remain theories as pure science dictates only the cessation of existence, nothing more.

For the believer in a benevolent God, death is merely a temporary condition that will have a final resolution in time;  Infinite existence for those who accept the gift of God, and infinite non-existence for those who have refused God’s offer.  This belief offers hope to those who are left behind in the wake of death of a loved one.  It inspires those who are left behind in this world to look forward to reunification.  The biggest problem with death, even for the believer, is the unexpected nature it inhabits.  No bigger interruption can we experience.  Plans made are stopped without warning.  All the intentions we had – frozen in time.  Even those that are terminally ill, and understand the soon coming approach of death are sometimes surprised when it actually arrives.  It is the surprise of death that adds to our pain, but truly, this is more a statement about how we live, than when we die.

When we think of our own mortality, we often look at it in grandiose terms.  What is the legacy we leave behind us?  What will history say about us (if anything), or what would our loved ones say?  Will we be missed?  Then comes the reality of what we will indeed be leaving – those we care about.  The thought of parting company with our children, our parents, our spouses, our families, our friends; the sadness can be overwhelming.  Thoughts like these rarely occur in any regularity among the healthy, the young, or the affluent.  Other than enduring a life insurance sales pitch we choose to simply continue our existence and ignore our mortality.  No sense in dwelling on what we cannot change, or avoid.  So we live in denial. 

Then all of the sudden, everything we were planning to do, everything we were planning to say, is put to an end.  No choice.  No negotiation.  No second chances.  Just gone.  Those that survive a near-death experience understand how close to this prospect they have just come.  Those that discover the unexpected loss of a loved one remain wondering what was left undone.  The living no longer have the option of expressing their feelings to the departed.  They no longer have the opportunity to ask for forgiveness, extend affection, or perform a service.  All of these feelings go unresolved, with no closure. 

Some believe that the departed can still hear us from the great beyond that our belated goodbyes can still be heard and appreciated.  Hollywood cashes in on these beliefs with barrage of films from Ghost to the more recent Over Her Dead Body.  The essential premise is that awareness, personality, thought, a form of conscience exists after death.  Interaction with the living is therefore inevitable, and somehow the masses buy into this thinking.  Of course logically the premise makes no sense.  If every loved one who ever departed this earth could come back and interact, wouldn’t all the jealousy, all the pettiness, all the anger and grief come back into every life, and not just for a single generation.  What is to stop great grandma, grandma, and mom from interacting under this belief system.  Agnostic’s simply write-off these Hollywood movies as simple fantasy stories, and so they are.  But some Christians ignore the Biblical precepts of death being similar to sleep, where the dead, know not anything.  They choose rather to believe that our unresolved feelings and expressions are still somehow visible to the departed.  Again a statement about how we live, in a further state of denial.

The simple truth is we are ALL dying.  Whether this process takes place tonight on the road home, through the process of a debilitating unexpected illness, or after many many decades and a full life at home in our beds – we remain dying.  The simple truth is that death has an important role to play in our lives, but not the one you might expect.  Death is a symbol of the unplanned, the unforeseen.  It reminds us that the priorities we place in our activities and plans may be misplaced in a grander scheme.  It reminds us to finish what we start in a time frame short enough to insure completion.  Don’t miss that opportunity to ask forgiveness, extend affection, or perform some service of love for another.  Living like you were dying is a bit redundant.  You are dying.  The point is to learn how to really live.  The point of death is not to induce despair about what is inevitable, it is to induce excitement about every breath you have remaining in you.  It is not your sleep you dread, it is the thought of an incomplete existence.

One need not spend their days seeking out the great wonders of the world, to feel as though their existence has had meaning.  What is the glory of the Taj Mahal against the love that inspired its construction.  What is the grandeur of the pyramids against the brilliance of the architecture of their designers, and the knowledge that even though Pharaoh thought himself to be God on earth, he lays within these brick walls, asleep.  What is the glory of the Vatican with all of its ornate sculpture and intricate paintings, against the religion it purports to honor where Christ says He reigns in the human heart, and that His kingdom is NOT of this world.  Why spend your days on earth honoring the creation of great artisans and ignore what you are able to contribute?

Your life has meaning.  Those you love, those who love you are of infinite value.  It remains that love is all that is important in our lives.  The things we have built may be wiped away like sand castles on the shore of the beach.  Our employer’s companies may pass on, our homes may be torn down to build the next great thing, our art may be discarded or remain undiscovered; but the love we extend in our lives has effects that live on in others.  It is the love that outlives us, the effects of love, like the effects of the wind – something you know has happened without being able to concretely explain the source.  This is the nature of love, and the reason it outlives us all.

Someday even death will be defeated for us.  Those who believe will be called back into existence to meet the God they began to get to know while here on this mortal coil.  At that time, sickness will be a thing of the past, a faded memory we will not be able to dwell upon.  At that time, all physical imperfections will be a thing of the past, every defect changed, every imperfection corrected – both in body and in mind and in soul.  Then existence will resume awakened from our brief encounter with unexpected sleep. 

Let us not be made fools by our mortality.  Let us choose to live and value love as we should.  Let us choose to remember that death interrupts us all, and not be surprised by it, but undaunted by it.  To vow to live the fullest existence we are capable of on a daily if not hourly basis.  Let us complete as much as we can in the time we have, not in despair, but in joy.  Don’t live like you were dying, live like you were planning to live both now and again someday in a more perfect world.  Live like you were loving, and loving all the time.  It is how you love that lives on forever and echoes past the corridors of time …

Priority Dysfunction ...

If all the world is a stage, then ‘distraction’ has to be the name of the play.  Time flies past you at speeds that cause you to take it for granted.  And while you occupy your mind and body with the trivial, the meaningful eludes you.  It is not that meaning is out of your grasp, it is too often simply out of your thoughts.  Maintaining a big picture set of priorities with all the distractions that bombard you for your attention is difficult.  The miniscule takes priority, the repetitive becomes preoccupation, and before you know it, your life is mundane, routine, and without any real purpose.  Christians are not immune to this phenomenon; in fact they are particular targets of it.

The easiest way to keep you from reaching your goals is simply to keep your mind focused elsewhere.  One of the chief reasons God setup a permanent time-out for humanity once each week was to try to help us get over our prioritization problems.  Consider for a moment the life of a parent.  A parent bares the responsibility for the care and feeding of a baby.  But demands on our finances, to succeed at our occupation, and maintain shelter for family can often keep a parent so preoccupied that the real needs of their child go un-met.  Of how much more value is the closeness felt between breast-feeding mother and infant, than formula-fed day care dropped-off baby.  Of how much more value is the tender words and touch of a father at bedtime and breakfast than the commuter who is awake long before, and at home long after the child is conscience.  Demands of survival are often so acute in today’s world that parents are choosing special moments to bond with their children – school plays, concerts, graduations, birthdays, holidays, etc..  There is simply no time to bond on a daily basis. 

Yet to discuss regret, a parent rarely regrets the missed promotion at work nearly as much as the time lost with toddlers.  First steps and first words are not the only milestones to be cherished.  What about first questions of the meaning of love, of life, and of purpose.  How do we impart values without investing our time?  Truth is we are imparting values like it or not; we pass on the tradition of hard-work, and lack of intimacy.  Time is of such critical importance, but we manage it as if it were an infinite resource.  We fail to recognize hard choices as such, thinking there is ample time in the future to meet everything we want to accomplish.  But before you know it, failing health, circumstance and fate, shorten the once thought long-term to an immediate here-and-now.  Regrets are inevitable when we fail to keep our priorities of what is truly important uppermost in our mind, our scheduling, and our attention.

God knew far better than we, that evil would work tirelessly to keep us distracted from what is truly important.  The intimacy God would have us experience, we are kept from simply by keeping us busy.  The intimacy of husband and wife, the intimacy of parent and child, the special bond between siblings, and of course the life-altering connection between man and his Savior God – all these relationships matter most in life.  They far outweigh the trivial pursuits so many of us call our lives.  They require time and attention to grow.  They need to be nurtured.  When you begin to realize this, you begin to understand why the concept of a ‘Sabbath’ is so important in our world.  A God created time-out for man.  Stop what we’re doing.  Stop thinking what we focus on.  Not because what we think about is wrong, but because what we focus on is robbing us of what is really important.  Until we separate ourselves from our routines and choose to focus elsewhere can we be free to see what our choices really are.

When Christ stated “the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath” He was trying to clear up the misconceptions of the day that man was obligated to ritualistic observance of the Sabbath.  The institution was created and ordained to help us push our reset button.  It is WE who need to break free from our self-imposed slavery to commercialism, materialism, and empty pursuits.  It is WE who so desperately need an institution like the Sabbath to give us a day of rest from the mind-numbing routines we enslave ourselves to.  It figures that the Creator of man who wrote the owners-manual would know best what man really needs to operate effectively.  We need a time-out or we being to break down, stress out, and find ourselves watching our lives pass us by.

Christians however sometimes misinterpret the true value and meaning of a Sabbath day.  They turn blessing into compulsion.  They turn an exercise in helping us reprioritize into a set of spiritual habits that are every bit as much a routine as the non-spiritual list of activities in our lives.  The Sabbath becomes a list of do’s and don’ts that could not possibly encompass the concept of ‘keeping’ the day holy.  No this is just the arrogance of man, combined with his ignorance and desire for blind structure instead of profound life-altering thinking that cannot be bound into a list.  How does one find his God and reconnect to Him through a set of arbitrary rules and lists designed to encapsulate morality without forethought to the values the lie behind it?  No, the Sabbath is about prioritization.  No singular activity can be evaluated in the light of the Sabbath the same way by all mankind.  Just as each human is an individual, each relationship with God will also have unique characteristics.  What one man finds as bringing peace and intimacy with his God, another may find no value in. 

The guidelines God gave were to help us bring home the point of prioritizing our lives properly.  First, God should be our number one priority – everything else, everything good, flows from the first thing we focus on.  Second we need to abstain from our career and commercial pursuits (i.e. our work).  We need to remember that our careers are NOT our lives, only a component of our lives.  Thirdly, we need to refrain from requiring others to work for us.  We must not be selfish in our time away from work, forcing others to take up our burdens, but we must allow them to share in the time away from routine.  Even our animals, or anything in our domain, should be allowed a break from the routine.  Lastly God reminds us that He is our creator, and this knowledge should help us understand that this time-out is for our benefit.

Following these guidelines and understanding the intense need we all have to reset our priorities makes the Sabbath an infinitely valuable tool in regaining meaning in our lives and steering clear of regrets.  Should we make the choice to come away from the world and give our minds the freedom to dwell elsewhere we can begin to live at a level we never thought possible. 

Christians must avoid the temptation to treat religious goals as weekly habits that occupy our times and schedules with the regularity of a Swiss watch.  Church service with a planned routine, followed by a meal, followed by a nap, followed by an evening meeting sound familiar?  Many Christians believe this is ‘keeping the Sabbath’, but is it?  Are we truly forcing our minds to break free from routine, or are we simply altering the content of our routines?  Routine limits creative thinking.  Routine can easily become forgettable, non-memorable, meaningless.  Christians develop an unhealthy dependency on their pastor to ‘feed’ them on a weekly basis.  Rather than being forced to confront God on their own, they seek anonymity within a congregation.  Rather than ponder the deeper meanings God wants to share with them personally, they seek to hear whatever the pastor has to say – after which they can feel good about criticizing his content and delivery.  Is this routine actually helping them, or just helping them pass the time.  Push the reset button folks.  Start thinking in non-conventional ways, the way the Sabbath was intended.

If we are to live without regret, we must learn to accept what God wishes for us.  We must learn to accept the happiness He wants to give us.  We must learn to prioritize what is truly important, and keep it there.  We must regularly check ourselves and insure our priorities have not been altered.  We must break free of the distractions of the stage we live within, and find the freedom only our God can bring …

Achieving Balance in Your Life ...

In our quest to get to know our God, we have been studying the things He established BEFORE our species chose to embrace evil.  We discovered our Creator’s love of variety in the plants, animals, and other forms of life he made for our enjoyment.  We discovered His lesson for us regarding intimacy in the creation of woman and the establishment of both marriage and sexual expression.  We discovered His great desire to be with us and commune with us, as every evening He would walk with Adam and Eve and talk (both of them naked and unashamed).  And there is yet another area of focus we can learn from during this golden time of our perfection.

Both Adam and Eve were not called into existence and then left with nothing to do.  They were assigned ‘jobs’ or the work of tending to their garden home.  Given that this task existed before there were seasons in our world, and that plants never died, this task may well have been daunting.  All the wildlife in the original Garden of Eden were vegetarian.  They ate the same fruits, nuts, berries, grains, etc.. our first parents ate.  The animals were both tame and unafraid of man.  Think of it, this garden existed before we embraced evil.  The carnage that comes when eating the flesh of another creature, would only have started ‘after’ sin entered our world.  Flesh foods were not missed at all in our original diet.  Imagine every conceivable fruit growing in constant bloom, never decaying or growing unfit to eat.  And as we have already witnessed our creator God really enjoys variety, so I imagine there was no lack of ‘new’ things to eat, or any shortages that would not have addressed the needs of the animal, bird, and fish life there.

This first assignment of our ancestors would not be something that ever lost its need for attention.  For this and many other reasons, God also created for our benefit a sense of time.  Putting our earth in rotation around a central star, the sun – gave us sunlight for half the day.  Giving us a moon to rotate our own planet, gave us the reflection of light at night, as well as a sky filled with an infinite number of other stars, solar systems, nebulae and galaxies to wonder at, or dream of while we slept.  This dividing of the day from the night, was an optional construct of God.  He could have just as easily created 2 suns for us, keeping our world constantly lit.  But apparently we were not created to work every hour of the day, we would need time each day, to relax.  Note that God walked with Adam and Eve in the evenings, probably around sunset in the ‘cool’ of the day, and talked with them.  But man would require setting even more time aside from his ‘work’ in order to achieve a balance in his life, than just the nightly time in which he slept.

So in honor of the day in which God rested from His work of creation, God decided to institutionalize the seventh day of the week as a permanent day-off.  It was a day of rest, to honor His rest from His work of creation.  A day of communion entirely devoted to man enjoying time-off with His God.  Keep in mind, the garden work was still there.  It had not diminished while man took this time off.  But God through this lesson, told us, we need to prioritize time for ourselves to commune with Him, undistracted by our normal work laden routines.  Also, keep in mind, that Adam & Eve did not give-up the daily evening walks with God, because they had this entire day to be with Him.  They continued daily building their relationships.  This special day was simply an additional blessing, or gift, of time they could devote as well to really focusing on their talks with God.  Note that there was nothing inherently special about this day, until God made it so.  God was the one who “blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it”.  He did not set it up for Himself, as He does not need to rest.  He set it up for man, because knowing our needs; He knew we would need a break from our ‘normal’ routines.  Without this time off, we would go nuts.  We would work ourselves to death or worry ourselves to death.  We needed something to break up the ‘daily grind’ and cause us to think, commune, and build our relationships with God even stronger.

This time-off concept was to help us achieve balance in our lives.  And it was started before evil corrupted our world.  If we needed time away from our routines even in Paradise, how much more do we need it now?  But the setting aside of this day, would also accomplish another goal, it would forever memorialize the act of creation itself.  By doing this, God was declaring that “He” made us in six days, and we belonged to Him – we are in fact His creations.  The word ascribed to setting aside this day to honor our God, and get closer to Him, became known as the “Sabbath Day”.  (In New Testament times this would also be called ‘the Lord’s day’ as it was the day which belonged to the ‘Lord’.  Jesus was in fact ‘the Lord of the Sabbath’.)

This becomes a very important lesson for us to learn.  Our God KNOWS we need time off.  He does not intend for us to ‘work’ ALL the time.  We NEED time with Him to grow our relationship with Him, not just weekly or daily, but both.  And what a blessing ‘the Sabbath’ has become in this day in age.  Demanding bosses, relentless marketers, everyone seemingly wants to occupy our every second of time.  And what a break from all this junk, is the Sabbath -   a time to get away from the mall, and the relentless attempts by merchandisers to relieve us of our money.  The Sabbath can be a time when we simply choose not work, but past that, not to even think about work – not to let the constant demands of our jobs and career advancements so take us over as people, that we forget even who we really are, what is really important in life. 

I have met my share of career obsessed executives who crave power, and success.  These devout folks are willing to place on the altar of success, their families, their relationships, their time, their energy, sometimes even their health.  And upon having achieved the success they chased, they are alone, empty, rich and emotionally destitute - far from any simple pleasure of life, and completely devoid of individual meaning.  The Sabbath can correct all this.  Observing the Sabbath allows one to keep their own priorities straight.  This life on earth is not about acquiring things, it is about a much deeper purpose.  Our time is an asset, which we must choose to manage and is as important as any other.  Observing the Sabbath allows one to say, even if my work place burned down today, I would not go in – there is something even MORE important than any job or career – in short, it is my own happiness, my joy, my fulfillment which I can ONLY acquire through time with my God.  Every death-bed-regret ever uttered had to do with how people spent what time they were given; no one ever bemoans their lack of time at work.  They regret missing family events, not spending enough time with the ones they love.  They miss their kids growing up.  They miss the spouse they lost through lack of time and attention.  All these regrets because we allow ourselves to be consumed with our quest for survival and success, rather than with what is truly important.  The Sabbath can correct this behavior, by helping us reprioritize our time, and avoid all these regrets.

But does it really matter what day you choose as your ‘Sabbath’?  Given our inability to exactly calculate when Creation occurred, and exactly how many days have passed since then, we rely on the best information we have at hand.  Our calendar was derived from the old Roman calendar, similar to the Egyptian one.  It is as good a guess as any, and outlines in it a seven day week - Saturday being the seventh-day.  God asks us to hold this particular day aside for our time-off with Him, so I believe we should honor His request.  Could we be off from the original calculations of time since Eden?  Yes, but it is the best information we have at present.  The Muslims who trace the ancestry of their religion to be in common with Abraham, worship on Friday’s, based on their own calendar.  I imagine if they are honoring the ‘seventh-day’ as God instructed and simply came to a different calculation on which day that is, this should be fine with God.  If however, they have chosen to change the day of worship from day 7 to day 6, that would be a problem.  Keep in mind that one of the reasons this day was important to God was that it commemorated our creation.  God rested on the seventh day, not the sixth.  He was busy making man on the sixth. 

In addition there are a good number of Christians who believe the day commemorating creation, was changed to the first day of the week to honor the resurrection of Christ.  Therefore they choose to honor Sunday instead of Saturday as their day of worship.  This idea became so popular over the years, we arrived at a ‘weekend’ off idea in our society (the old day off for worship, and the new day off for worship).  But there are a few problems with idea that Christ changed the day.  1.) Nowhere in scripture does it ever explicitly state the day was changed, by Christ, or anyone else.  2.) Christ was our God of Creation in the first place, this was something He setup – and throughout His entire life on earth – He observed His own day.  3.) The prophet Isaiah refers to Sabbaths as being observed in Heaven long after the destruction of evil – meaning it was not ‘nailed to the cross’ as some have offered.  What God did creating this earth will always be relevant throughout time and space.  4.) Early Christians worshipped on the Saturday Sabbath, until 300 A.D. when Constantine the first real Pope decided to change the day to Sunday to avoid getting Christians and Jews mixed up.  5.) There have always been those who did not accept a change in this doctrine and resisted it, even to the point of giving up their lives over it – including in today’s age.  So it does make a bit of difference, but then listening to what God asks us to do, has always been important.