Monthly Archives: August 2007

Eugene Peterson on Sabbath

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A friend (can I call you that, Darin?) passed this on to me some time ago. After reading it several times, it’s time to post it.

This is from “Christ Plays in Ten thousand Places” (page 117)…

If there is no Sabbath- no regular and commanded not-working, not-talking — we soon become totally absorbed in what we are doing and saying, and God’s work is either forgotten or marginalized. When we work we are most god-like, which means that it is in our work that it is easier to develop god-pretensions. Un-sabbathed, our work becomes the entire context in which we define our lives. We lose God-consciousness, God-awareness, sightings of resurrection. We lose the capacity to sing “this is my fathers world” and end up chirping little self-centred ditties about what we are doing and feeling.

The Most difficult command to keep, a most difficult practice to cultivate. It is one of the most abused and distorted practices of the Christians life. Many through the centuries have suffered much under oppressive Sabbath regimes. And more than a few of us have been among the oppressors.

Recent years have convinced me that most of us have missed this Sabbath thing seriously, if not completely.

Whereas we sometimes perceive it as a law or tedious set of rules that Jesus appears to have disliked, Scripture appears to paint it more as a divine rhythm, a thread in the fabric of reality. It just might be built right into the very essence of the universe.

And if any of that is true, then swimming against the flow might prove to be more destructive than we might have first imagined.

If you haven’t started chewing on the Sabbath idea yet, it’s time to begin.

Peterson is a good fellow to start with, so pop that piece in and start chewing.

Relative

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Walking around within any Chinese city lets one view a whole lot of cars.  And most of them look the same.  Most of them (including every single taxi) are a make called a Citroen.  It’s a hatchback about the size of the old VW Rabbits.  And this is the standard for a car over here.  Add to that some other tiny cars and a whole lot of scooters and motorbikes and bicycles, and one’s mind just gets tuned to much smaller vehicles.

Then we walked past a Lincoln Navigator.

Do you know what those look like?

I’ll tell you what they look like.

At that moment, in this place, through these eyes, it looked like a monstrosity…

A road-hogging, fuel-chugging, indulgent-to-the-max smog-causer.

I realize that one might see such vehicles at Wal-Mart any day of the week back home.

But here and now, it just reminded me, “Man, everything is sure relative.”

And I’m not sure that “relative” is always good.

Boom

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So we’re walking outside our hotel tonight, and we see this…

Rice Cannon

Now we’re not even sure what we’re looking at. With nearby construction sites, I’m thinking he’s doing some weird cement mixing or something. If not that, he’s doing some odd pottery baking. He’s cranking this blackened pot around and around in a fire. Like I said, we have no idea what he’s doing. Logically then, we have no idea how long whatever he’s doing is going to take. So we walk away.

And that’s when things went up a notch.

We turned our backs and walked away. We’d taken no more than six steps.

And then a CANNON went off right behind us. No joke. The sound rattled off of every building in the street and set off car alarms in the area.

My wife is normally cool and composed in nearly every situation. But in that moment, it sounded as if an unnamed Sesame Street character was trying to escape from her throat. I’ve replayed that squeak-cry-yell-yelp-scream-squawk several times since the boom… and it makes me laugh out loud every time.

In fact, the moments after the blast were some of the best on our trip.

We laughed.

And laughed.

And laughed.

We replayed the whole thing over and over, laughing so hard that we had to stop and bend over several times.

If you could have seen the crowd, I’m sure you’d have seen an old guy (the blast-causer) amused at the two foreigners he’d just caused to pee themselves. The rest of the onlookers would have thought we were drunk from how hard we were laughing at ourselves.

So I never finished…

What WAS the noise?

You won’t believe the answer.

As we walked around a nearby park, we heard the noise several more times, so we knew it hadn’t been an accident. As we returned, we heard it again, and noticed that some product of the blasts was actually being bagged and sold to customers. And there was a familiar smell in the air.

I mean, a really familiar smell.

He was making popcorn.

Yeah, he was using some “I’ve-never-seen-that-before-what-the-heck-is-it-and-what-planet-am-I-on” method to make a snack.

Orville would be proud.

PS: We’ve since learned that it was actually rice instead of corn. So Snap, Crackle, and Pop are technically the fellows who would be proud.

Christ the Lord Out of Egypt

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I just finished this best-selling novel by Anne Rice.  So now I’m about to make a recommendation, but it’s not the one you’re expecting.

If you want to do some reflecting on what Jesus might have felt like growing up, read this novel.

If you want to be more informed on the type of family and home in which he may have been raised, pick this one up.

If you want to better understand the politics and economics that would have been “everyday stuff” to his childhood family, read this book.

But now here’s the recommendation… even if you don’t want any of the above stuff, borrow this book from the library.  Even just take off the bookstore shelf.  Read the “Author’s Note” at the back.  It’s about 18 pages long and speaks fantastically Anne Rice’s research done for this book.  But it was more than research for a project.  It was an obsession, a heart-filling, everything-I’ve-got-is-in kind of search… and it is inspiring to read about.

I enjoyed the book a great deal.  I loved the “Author’s Note”!

Eyes

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I got my eyes checked before I left home. I was due for a new prescription and looking for both new glasses and contacts. After my $100 check-up of blurry barns, letters that I trusted were actually letters, and air puffs into my eyeballs, he smiled kindly and asked if he could help me choose some new frames.

I smiled kindly back, and replied, “No thanks. I’m going to China.”

And so I have.

So with the help of Shannon and good friends (Alice and Wind) who vowed to help me look younger and cooler, I picked up two new pairs of glasses (frames and lenses) and a year’s worth of contacts for just under 700 yuan… about $98.

And all that was after we had treated us and four of our friends to a feast at a favourite restaurant… for 40 yuan (under $6).

This post comes to you from our sponsors at “Types of Shopping that Make me Smile”.