A couple of years ago I spent part of a Barnes and Noble Christmas gift card on a date book for the upcoming new year. The spiral bound log was pretty and functional with plenty of room to write down all the things that keep me from getting my eight hours. However, I discovered (after the purchase) that it had one design flaw that bothered me. The weeks started with Monday, instead of Sunday. This didn’t bother me because it upset the flow of my personal schedule; it bothered me because it upset my theology. I felt like the book designers were messing with world history and giving the bird to God himself. In reality, I’m sure that the book designers were just operating out of a utilitarian approach to life.

This utilitarian approach to life seems to be the norm here in America. It’s why we pick and choose which parts of the Decalogue (The Ten Commandments) are useful to us. We have laws against killing and stealing (Commandments Six and Eight), but the rest of the commandments are often blatantly ignored or mocked. Remember the pro football player who was killed by his mistress and then publicly celebrated as a wonderful human being by his coaches, teammates and friends? We all have our flaws, but one of his (adultery) got him murdered, and that fact was ignored. Still, this kind of behavior is to be expected when we live in a utilitarian, pluralistic society. I’m not surprised or bewildered by such attitudes. What is more baffling to me is why more people, especially Christians, don’t embrace the Fourth Commandment. Christians often do get worked up about the breaking of the other nine, but are totally indifferent to this one. We Christians often seem happy to hop on the Ferris wheel of life and ride in circles with everyone else.

The Fourth Commandment says, “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, in it you shall not do any work, you or our son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.” (Exodus 20:9-11)

I find it interesting that this is the one commandment where God specifically notes his example. One would think that the concept of resting could easily be grasped without need of illustration. But we don’t, and God, of course, knows what thick-headed people we are. We stumble over this commandment due to sin, but also ignorance. I think modern generations have been a little freaked out by how our ancestors observed it. We hear stories of half-day sermons by Puritan pastors, or pioneer children having to sit on cabin benches without moving a muscle until sunset. I think these stories of what seems to us to be drudgery are confusing. They also seem to contradict what Jesus said, “”The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27) I also think a general lack of knowledge contributes to our struggle.

For many years of my life I believed that Christians worshipped on Sundays because Christ rose from the dead on the first day of the week. I wasn’t aware of the intentional act by the apostles to change the sabbath observance from Saturday to Sunday as a direct result of the fulfillment of prophecy. As Jews, the apostles realized that they were no longer looking forward to the coming of the Messiah. Messiah (Jesus Christ) had come; therefore, it was symbolic that instead of “looking forward” all week to rest as they had “looked forward” to Messiah, they now began their week with the celebration of the accomplished rest from labor and sin that Christ provided in his work on the cross.

This is why it bothered me when my date book began my weeks on Mondays. It seemed to be encouraging me to forget or deny a foundational truth about my life as a Christian. At worst, it encouraged me to sin because neglect of keeping the Lord’s Day is a sin (whether Christians admit it or not). But I don’t observe the Lord’s Day out of a legalistic fear of judgment. I celebrate it because there is amazing joy and blessing in resting, worshipping, playing and feasting. As Eugene Peterson writes in Confessions of a Former Breaker, “Sabbath is the biblical tool for protecting time against desecration. It is the rhythmic setting apart of one day each week for praying and playing — the two activities for which we don’t get paid, but which are necessary for a blessed life. A blessed life is what we are biblically promised. A blessed life is not a mere survival life, but a bountiful life.” This I must remember regardless of my date book. Tomorrow I will get off the Ferris wheel.

Postlude: As often happens when I try to whip out a blog, I return to find fault with my own writing. In this case, I’ve decided that the Ferris wheel analogy is not the best. It might be construed that I think riding Ferris wheels isn’t an appropriate thing to do on Sundays. Not true. Having fun, especially with family and friends, on Sundays is great (in my view). What I intended to picture with the wheel is one’s inability to set aside the routine cycle of life. Oh…I also really wanted to use this great photo my son took!

I’m only writing today because I promised myself (and maybe Aunt Sue) that I would blog at least every two weeks. It was fun hearing from all the Dylan fans after my last blog. Evidently blogging about Dylan sets off some kind of alert system in blogosphere. I wish I could wax poetically and Dylan-like about the past two weeks, but I don’t have the time or energy. Life has been full of the quotidian. In all its beauty, that still boils down to plain old busyness. By the way, I use the word “quotidian” on purpose because it reminds me of fun times teaching an art class to a little group of great kids. The class wasn’t quotidian, but that word came up – in some art critic’s review of Dutch painters. Having special memories to dip into is one of the things that fuels me on these long stretches on life’s highway. I thought about saying “desert” highway, but that makes it sound like my life is dry and barren. It’s anything but. It’s been full of job losses and gains, car break-downs, car shopping, motherhood, teenagers…Halloween. Remember when I groaned about my sewing skills? When I used duct tape to alter my great pair of jeans? I sewed a chef hat for my daughter’s Halloween costume. I won a battle with the sewing machine last Saturday. That was my crowning achievement for the last couple of weeks. Then again, maybe my true crowning achievement was remembering that real life is about chef hats and little girls.

Last Saturday I experienced my first Bob Dylan concert. Even now, trying to write about it, makes me feel…not exactly star-struck, but a little inept. It was probably one of the most poetic experiences of my life — in a surprisingly organic kind of way. But it’s taken me a week to reach this conclusion. My first impression was that a Dylan concert is a lot like a Bob Dylan autobiography. The lights go up, the lights go down. You only see what he wants you to see –at least that’s what you think — in the beginning.

In the beginning of the concert, before the lights went up, Bob was introduced by an unnamed recorded male voice whizzing through these words: “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the poet laureate of rock ‘n’ roll. The voice of the promise of the ’60s counterculture. The guy who forced folk into bed with rock. Who donned makeup in the ’70s and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse. Who emerged to find Jesus. Who was written off as a has-been by the end ’80s, and who suddenly shifted gears releasing some of the strongest music of his career beginning in the late ’90s. Ladies and gentlemen – Columbia recording artist, Bob Dylan!” Then the lights went up, and for the next 90 minutes we only saw him when he was playing and singing a mere 14 of the over 400 songs the icon has released over the past 47 years. The only words he spoke were to introduce his band, and that didn’t come until after the first song of the three-song encore.

But that is the genius of the Poet Laureate of Rock ‘n’ Roll. He forces us to focus on the songs, the poetry. Bob Dylan accomplishes in a very literal sense what C.S. Lewis wrote about poets, “The poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says ‘look at that’ and points.”

You cannot look at a man in the dark, and in the concert, Bob turned on the lights (literally and figuratively) with every song. That is how he points us to the full, brilliant pictures of life — his and ours. Seeing Bob Dylan in concert didn’t show me anything new about this legend. You don’t have to “see to believe” Bob Dylan. You just have to listen.

I’m not too proud to admit that I accept hand-me-downs (what my mom tells me I called “me-toos” as a three-year-old). Actually, I was too proud to make that admission, but that was before I needed something to write about. It was also before September 27, the day I walked into my closet and learned I was afflicted with that age-old women’s ailment: Nothing To Wear. Except that I did have one thing to wear. That great pair of barely worn jeans a friend had passed on to me. These jeans fit perfectly – or at least as perfectly as anything has fit since January 6, 2006. That was the day my body decided I could no longer out-eat every man at the table and not suffer the consequences. There was also the little detail that my friend is three inches taller than me. But hey, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do, and I can sew.

At least I could sew. I sewed in my freshman Home Economics class. I sewed a white terry cloth jogging suit with elastic at the waistband (of both the top and pants) and elastic at the ankles. OK. It was hideous, but my family has a long history of seamstresses. Somewhere in my nephews’ closet hangs a little wool navy pea coat that my mother, a self-professed country girl tomboy, sewed for my brother. It’s fully lined and everything. It would be at home on a rack in the Boys Department of Nordstroms. And don’t get me started on my grandmother, proprietor of the TLC Doll Hospital. That woman could hand-stitch tiny doll clothes that looked better than anything sewn with a machine.

Sewing is in my genes, so I could surely handle hemming a pair of jeans. With visions of my mother and grandmother in my mind, I made my way to the garage. What I needed was…there it was! Duct tape! A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

I’m not sure whether I was shaking my fist at the flu bug that has invaded my home, or just reminding myself that despite more than a few dusty picture frames, a tinge of domesticity does inescapably flow through my veins. Whatever it was that came over me yesterday afternoon, I ended up with a newly decorated dining room table. Perhaps “newly” is the wrong word. There wasn’t much new to my choice of accoutrements. It was all old stuff – because I like it like that – because whatever doubt there may be about domesticity in my veins, the sentimentality running there, is undeniable.

The final touches are the framed “Welcome” signs made with fallen autumn leaves from our Oregon neighborhood. My daughters hunted them like treasure under the drizzly skies. I was in charge of coming up with a craft project for a girls’ club to which they belonged at the time. Among all the gifts our Creator gave to teach us about beauty and creativity and the miraculous cycle of life, the crimson leaf speaks volumes – even from the confines of my dining room table.

I didn’t expect the application of Donald Miller’s ideas to slap me in the face quite so quickly.

Not everyone appreciates the author of Blue Like Jazz, but I do. Don moved from Houston to Oregon; I moved from Oklahoma City to Oregon. I find familiarity in his writing. Mostly I like his writing because he tells good stories. In fact, his latest book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, is about story.

When I found out that he was on a tour promoting his new book, and that he would be coming to a city near me, I asked my husband if we could take our daughter (the one I affectionately call “Writer Chick”) to hear Don. My husband did what a responsible husband should do. He considered my request in light of the financial and time management ramifications it would have on us. He showed me that it might not be the best time for us to go. I was “okay” with his decision because I always pray that he is the kind of man who gives thoughtful consideration about the stewardship of our resources.

As we drove to church a couple days later he told me he had purchased a new golf putter on line. He was excited about what an incredible deal he’d made on this new putter. He asked me how much I thought the new putter cost. “Was it less than Donald Miller tickets?” I asked.

He told me later it was a good question, but I still apologized for “guilt-tripping” him into making the hour-plus drive to Mesa to see Don.

Don was great, Susan Isaacs who is touring with him was great, and our daughter was gushingly inspired in a way that only 15-year-old aspiring authors can be. But, like I said, I didn’t expect that Don’s ideas would slap me in the face so quickly. I expected to mull things over for a few weeks, applying them in artistic ways at my own convenience.

My husband’s wisdom usually prevails. He knows far more than good deals on golf clubs, and he knew what he was talking about in his hesitancy to make the trip to Mesa. I really didn’t have the time to go see Donald Miller. As a consequence I spent the next afternoon frantically working on publishing the newsletter I supervise for our daughters’ school. I was still recovering from the deadline frenzy when my husband was reading the newsletter last night. “That’s a pretty big typo, Hon,” he said to me. “You left out the ‘i’ in movie for the Movie Review headline.”

I was sick. Typos are bad, but typos in headlines are unconscionable. So much for frenzy recovery. My night was ruined. I tried reading the last 200 pages of the Pat Conroy tome I started three months ago. I tried reading Don’s new book. I even tried watching MTV’s 100 Greatest Hard Rock Songs. I couldn’t get over my mistake. I went to bed, but woke up at 3:00 a.m. and told God I realized that this was yet another lesson on humility, and begged Him to help me get over it so I could get some sleep. God didn’t let me close my eyes; He opened them a little wider.

I kept thinking about the typo. There is an “i” in the word movie. It’s a fact as big as a big screen. How could I not catch that? I began to think about what Don had said about movies, how they only tell one story. The protagonist gets to say, “I did this. I was confronted with this conflict. I worked through it like this. I have a story to tell.” That’s it! It’s fitting that there is an “i” in movie. There has to be an “i” in movie. If there is no “i,” time will just move aimlessly, uneventfully across the screen. But here’s the thing…as Don told us, our lives aren’t like movies. We don’t have just one story to tell. We have STORIES. There IS an “i” in stories! And this whole little typo conflict is just one little story that’s moving me on to something beautiful.

I hope I never forget the “i” in stories…but I probably will. It makes a better story that way.

I received a gift from my mom a few days ago. She sent it because of something my dad had done when he was still alive. He was an oil well pumper and a farmer, a man who knew how to draw things up from the soil. The gift made me think about planting seeds that will be reaped in due season.

Flannery O’Connor said, “To the hard of hearing you shout and for the blind you draw large and startling figures.” Her startling Southern Gothic writing is true to her conviction. I don’t know if she did, but it makes sense that she might have appreciated the artist, Edvard Munch, who vowed to paint people who “breathed and had emotions, that suffered and loved.” As a person who breathes and has emotions, who suffers and loves, and who is sometimes hard of hearing and blind, there are times when I need to be approached with shouts – or screams. That’s part of the reason my new motto is, “Shut up and pray.”

I don’t use my motto on other people, of course. Telling someone else to “shut up” is rude. Growing up, I was taught that uttering those six little letters was as offensive and vulgar as the worst four-letter profanity. To this day, “shut up” is a command that shocks me, makes me cringe. It’s a scream to me even when hissed in a whisper. That’s what makes it effective on my dull, deluded self.

Sometimes I need to cringe. Like when my mouth is spewing frustrations, fears and anxieties. More often than not, I only spew internally, dialoguing with a self that is engaging in futile situational dissection. Shut Up is the lasso that reins in stampeding thoughts, and like an animal resigned to the restraint, I am calmed enough to overcome the blindness. Here, my blindness is thinking that that the shock of Shut Up is all I need. No, the second half of my motto is absolutely essential.

It’s not enough just to shut up; I must pray. Praying puts me at the feet of the One who utters words obeyed by wind and rain. The lasso can be loosed; I am held here by awe. His words are, “Be still and know that I am God.” I am convinced that I benefit from my strident self admonishments, because I am even more convinced of the benefits of being admonished by the God of the universe. I may scream, He makes me still.

I was in true Woman Never Sleeps mode this morning, waking up around 3:30 a.m. It wasn’t anxiety or angst that was scaring off the sandman; it was my back-to-school joie de vivre. I was hankering to get to that Spanish curriculum that I’ve been working on for the co-op students. There’s something stimulating about learning alongside kids who are about a third of your age. I went downstairs to make a cup of coffee and check out the sink (dishes are always sprouting up over night there.)

Not surprisingly, the sink held someone’s ice cream bowl and a few other odds and ends. I started unloading and reloading the dishwasher while I waited on the coffee to finish brewing. Being in the kitchen, my thoughts naturally turned to food. Tomorrow is Grocery Shopping Day which means that my kids have been having to scavenge through the depleted pantry for breakfast fare. Maybe I should be a “good mom” and actually make them something. I did remember to buy muffin papers at the store last time – I could make muffins! I grabbed the new Better Homes and Garden New Cookbook that my kids gave me for Christmas a few years ago, and complain that I never use. (I can’t help it that I’m more familiar with my old one…at least I used it!) Before long I was mixing up the Basic Muffin recipe and, el espanol was melting from my mind like fried ice cream on a Phoenix patio.

The muffins baked, their cinnamony aroma only slightly marred by the spot of smoldering pork tenderloin juice I spilled in the bottom of the oven last night. I put the muffin ingredients up and noticed in the refrigerator the cantaloupe my husband bought several days ago. It might be a good idea to cut it up so someone would eat it! Does anyone else find it relaxing to spoon and clean out the fibrous-seedy inside of a melon? And what was it that I had been in such a hurry to work on this morning? Oh, si! Well, my morning mania to be productive with a foreign language was ambushed by a kitchen speaking a totally different one. Mmmm.

My dining room chairs have given me a whole new perspective on the saying, “Look on the bright side.” Their history is part of my history, which includes spending over eight years in the cloudy, misty, rainy Pacific Northwest. In fact, these chairs first joined us shorty after moving into our gray two-story on Gilesford Street. I remember the day my husband and I picked them out at the furniture store. I loved the colorful striped fabric. I loved the cozy ambiance I knew they’d bring to our dining room.

I also loved those gray days in our gray house. But even the biggest fan of rain sometimes longs for a little sunshine. And the sun always did shine…eventually. My chairs wear the proof. One of them backed up to a window and the sunshine gradually licked away at its vibrant color. It took me years to notice the difference, otherwise, I probably would have been more vigilant at closing the curtains on sunny days. Then again, closing the curtains on a sunny day in Oregon just seems wrong.

Right or wrong, I now have chairs that need to be recovered – which probably be won’t be happening for awhile. In the meantime, I can enjoy the lesson they teach me: the sun WILL shine again.