Worship at Milledge Avenue Baptist Church.

SABBATH RETREAT Amy Shorner-Johnson

By now, I hope that you are feeling a different pace at Milledge. We are in the middle of our Sabbath Practicing, a time for reflection, growth and rest. We hope you are enjoying learning in Sunday School as we practice a few Sabbath traditions together. I hope you have also heard a little about our Sabbath Retreat last week, and the important discussions that happened there. The retreat focused on giving and receiving God's love, which is deeply rooted in the understanding of Sabbath. Breaking from our work to simply be in God’s presence is a way of receiving and accepting God's love that is freely given for us.

At the retreat, we talked about some practical ways of receiving God's love with our hearts, souls, minds and strengths, and how we could begin to live in such a way. We also acknowledged that making changes that we want to make in order to give and receive God's love are not always easy. In fact, making any realistic changes in our lives is often difficult, not only to begin but to maintain our new way of life. We were encouraged to engage in a practice called "turtle steps," that is, taking the biggest possible step you can take with the weight of the world on your back.

The story was told about a woman who was writing her dissertation, hoping that since she did not have an official job other than school and home life, that she would devote eight hours a day to writing. Well, with life as it was, nine months went by and not a word was written. But after watching her son, a young boy with down syndrome, she noticed that what looked like tiny steps were the life changing, permanent steps that actually changed his life. So she decided to apply the same concept to her own writing. So she decided that she should cut her work time in half, but she still didn't find herself writing. She tried again, cutting her writing time to two hours, but still she was not excited about her project. On and on she cut her time in half, until she made it to fifteen minutes a day. At that point, she joyfully found herself wanting to write, and that was how she proceeded for the next year. Some days she wrote a paragraph. Some days she wrote a page. Some days she simply looked up her adviser's phone number and put it by the phone. But every day, fifteen minutes seemed like an easy task, and within the next year she proceeded to finish her dissertation.

Some may find this to be a silly process, and a lot of us laughed at first too. But I think it was something all of us needed to hear, because we all had known the face of defeat. But in this woman's story, there is a lot of hope and grace out there for people like you and me, who can't be everything to everybody, who can't be perfect or even appear to have it all together. Living in a world where the expectations are always high, in a world that demands so much of our time and energy, I have come to realize during Sabbath, that the grace and love of God are gifts to let me be who I am instead of who the world wants me to be. I can simply be a human rather than a super human, because human is what God created me to be, and that was all God asked of me. Receiving that grace gives me the option to do things differently, to feel the freedom to change instead of the force, resistance, and failure. And that those small "turtle steps" towards love and grace can make more of a difference over time than any large steps I have taken for the rest of the world. Thanks be to God for such a gift.