If You CouldLive Anywhere...Where Would You Want To Live?

I had a student some years ago mention that as soon as she graduated high school she was getting as far from her hometown as possible. She wanted to escape the boredom of a small town in North Carolina. Head out to the big city. This comment came after the students had asked me a bit about where I was from. I find this question to be quite difficult to answer. If I could live anywhere in the world where would I want to be? I’ve lived enough places to find this question difficult. I can remember being quite bored in all of the places I have lived. I can remember being most definitely unhappy. You can’t live everywhere. And all places have their unique delights what makes life most enjoyable most satisfying is found in relationships. I don’t just mean personal relationships though these certainly are among the most significant of our relationships, but the way we relate to the place in which we live. Our work, our community involvement, our friendships, our family, our hobbies, our relationships shape life far more definitively than the weather and the view. This reality confronts us with a further challenge. We are not entirely in control of these relationships. We do not have the ability to simply construct them in the way we can choose to move somewhere. This is where the difficulty in this question rests at least for me. Where would I choose to live? I don’t find the question helpful because such choice points one after a disconnection from the very relationships that make life most satisfying.

Why Read Poetry?

When was the last time you sat down to read from a collection of poems? I find that in my experience most people don’t read poetry. This goes for English teachers as well. We can draw from our lack of interest in poetry…that this has been the generally held attitude towards poetry by most people at most times...i.e. the only reason people read poetry is because it is assigned reading... But such an assumption is challenged as one surveys the kinds of material that have been preserved throughout the centuries. There is a lot of poetry. One may see this by simply flipping through the pages of the Old Testament in a modern translation. The different way the text is set on the page reveals that the translators recognize a significant portion as poetry. Poetry is not only found in the Bible but in cultural heritages around the world. From Homer…to the Quran…to the Ramayana…and one could go on. Poetry represents a significant bulk of the literary achievement of civilizations. While most people do not regularly read poetry today, this does not mean that people do not encounter ideas that are expressed in the way ideas are expressed in poetry. When I ask a room full of people whether they read poetry, the answer is almost always that most people do not. When I ask the same group whether they regularly listen to music the answer is almost one hundred percent response in the affirmative. But what does it matter? One may consider this question how many times have you watched your favorite television show? One may have on DVD their favorite series they may have watched their favorite episode ten or fifteen times, but there is a limit to the number of times one watches their favorite television show. When you think about how many times you listen to your favorite song one finds that this number is quite different. One might listen to their favorite song over one hundred times. The reason for the difference helps us understand the different way in which poetry functions. The song isn’t just about someone else but it invites us to hear words that give voice to our situation. So what does this mean for our reading of the Bible? More to come….

Sabbath

The practice of the Sabbath offers us the reminder that we can trust God. The first observance of the Sabbath is actually before this passage in Exodus 20 it is found in Exodus 16. Here is where the people have just entered the wilderness. They have escaped from their captors in Egypt. They have been delivered from the army of Pharaoh. They have made it into the Sinai and there is no food. How are we going to live? You recall how they survived. God provided for the people Manna. The word Manna in Hebrew actually means, “What is it?” They were to gather enough each day for the needs of their family. When they gathered too much it would rot over night. Each family was able to gather enough for that day except on the sixth day they were told to gather enough for the Sabbath. Some were not sure that it would be enough and so they went out the next day but there was no manna on the seventh day. The manna they collected on the sixth day was enough.

One of the reasons it is easy for athletes to live as if they will be able to play forever and the same reasons we live our lives often times as if there will always be more time, is because it is very difficult to face the fact that our lives are limited. There are a number of popular songs that have as a premise a person coming to realize how precious life is. In the song someone realizes through the death of a friend or through bad news at the doctor’s office that they are facing the reality of their mortality. But the response is something that is really not possible to imitate. How am I supposed to live as if I were dying? I would want to spend every moment with my children, or my parents. I would want to ring pleasure from every moment of life. This of course is not possible because of our obligations to others. The sustaining answer for us is found in the practice of Sabbath. It is in recognizing that we place our dependence not in our retirement accounts. It is not that we have saved up enough vacation days that at some point we will catch up. We weekly stop from our works to worship God in whom we place our trust.