Whether it is a vacation, a weekend or a snow day, we all need (physically, mentally and spiritually) periodic breaks from the everyday of life.
At some point in my life I remember a slogan, whose origins I do not remember (and could not find in my web search):
a break from the everyday
I love my life, my job, the routines and rhythms of my days … that is what gets me up and keeps the hamster on the wheel.
But …
it is the times of break from the everyday routines that are the fuel for the everyday.
I experience, what I like to call my undiagnosed ADHD, as soon as a break begins. It is a struggle to sleep (though exhausted) and a struggle to sit still. I am like a child at Christmas … not wanting to waste a precious second of this gift of time (usually refinishing a new ‘treasure’). Eventually sleep does come and a book or puzzle does get pulled out … and I breath.
The season of Lent is a similar break. Perhaps the break is from a habit or pleasure, perhaps it is the addition of prayer, or fasting, or both.
Lent culminates in the remembering of Christ’s final week … the entrance to Jerusalem, the final supper, betrayal, night in Gethsemane, arrest, trial, torture, crucifixion, death, and rising again.
It is his rising again that gives us breath, that makes our everyday hope-filled. It is in his rising that gives us a break from the emptiness of routine without hope of renewal … renewal that lasts an eternity.
Sabbath Poem V,
Wendell Berry
Six days of work are spent To make a Sunday quiet
That Sabbath may return.
It comes in unconcern;
We cannot earn or buy it. Suppose rest is not sent
Or comes and goes unknown, The light, unseen, unshown. Suppose the day begins
In wrath at circumstance,
Or anger at one’s friends
In vain self-innocence
False to the very light, Breaking the sun in half,
Or anger at oneself
Whose controverting will Would have the sun stand still. The world is lost in loss
Of patience; the old curse Returns, and is made worse As newly justified.
In hopeless fret and fuss, In rage at worldly plight Creation is defied,
All order is unpropped,
All light and singing stopped.
itsawonderfilledlife 