Friends,

Greetings from Sweden!  Rich and I are enjoying another quiet morning in the sunroom of ‘our flat’ in Örebro where I am spending the summer and Rich is here for the month of July.  We are grateful for this opportunity to spend some quality time with our granddaughters (and their parents of course) and to take an extended time away to rest and recharge.  A couple of things have made this possible; airline miles from the design work I have done this last year and the generosity of Barrett’s in-laws who have made their flat in town available to us while they spend their summer at their lake house 30 minutes from town.  The flat is a 10-minute walk from Barrett’s home which gives us some needed distance but close enough for the girls to walk over whenever they want.

We are both looking at this time away as a sabbatical.  The word sabbatical comes from the Hebrew word shabbat or sabbath.  The concept of the sabbatical is based on the Biblical practice of shmita (sabbatical year) from Leviticus 25 where the Jews in the land of Israel were to take a year-long break from working the fields every seven years.  This sabbatical year not only gave them rest from their labors but also encouraged them to trust in the provision of God to meet their daily needs. The law of the sabbath year was to give the land a year of rest, with no sowing, harvesting or pruning.  Produce that grew naturally was to be available for everyone’s consumption, including livestock.  The sabbath year was to be a time for rest and reflection, acknowledging God’s ownership of the land. Even the foreigner living among them were to be included.

During my years of leading the women’s reflective retreats at Mount Hermon we often talked about sabbath.  The weekends were short sabbaticals from our day-to-day routines; a time set aside to rest and reflect.  Several times we used the definition of sabbath from Sally Breedlove’s book, Choosing Rest.

“If we are to know rest at all in this life, it will have to be like this.  A time when we stop, a time when we celebrate what is, in all its goodness and blessing; a time when we suffer or allow some things to still be lacking. At its core, to rest is to give thanks for the present and to trust that asthe future becomes the present , God will supply what we need.”

This time in Sweden has been a time to stop, a time for deep gratitude for the life we have been given and the privilege of the work God has called us to and most importantly, a time to allow somethings to remain unfinished or lacking both in us and in the world that is suffering. To trust that as we rest that God is at work both in us and in the world. This is sabbatical for us.

Blessings, Rich and Jayne