Our pastor Sara preached a wonderful, appropriate, timely, wise, passionate sermon this morning about the importance of taking a Sabbath rest. She pointed out scriptures that instruct us to do so, and reflected on the Jewish Shabbat rituals, and made a beautiful analogy. She pulled a bottle of water from behind the pulpit. (You must imagine a tall, slender, curly haired woman speaking in a light Scottish accent here for the full beauty of the moment.) “This water is from a river. {notice, gentle reader, the turgid muddy brownness of this water in the bottle} The current is so busy, moving constantly, that the muck and the mud is always stirred up.” She set the bottle on the lectern and moved about the front of the church, and at the end of her sermon moved back to the lectern. “When we take time for a Sabbath rest, when we stop our hurrying and doing and going and working {now, gentle reader, allow your eye to fall upon the bottle again: mud and silt lodged at the bottom, and clear sparkling water from there to the top of the bottle} all of the muck and mud in our lives settles, and we reclaim the clear, pure beauty our souls were meant to have.”

That sentiment captures so well the essence of what I’m trying to do this cycle: I’m simply going to stop. And surrender. Let the current of life swirl around me, but I am going to settle all my sediment for a while, and enjoy the peace and serenity of a Sabbath.


(By the way, for anyone still counting along ~not unlike a Sesame Street game, eh?~ I’m 13 days past ovulation and my period is due tomorrow. I’ll keep you posted.)