Yesterday I stitched together posts  about John 4, explored  ideas with our Saturday night small group, and preached. I’m grateful for the responses, grateful for what I learned while studying.

I don’t want to talk about the message here. I want to talk about the day after.

The day after I teach or preach is often a pretty numb day. I spend Sunday playing tapes in my head, identifying the “what I should have said” and “what I could have said” and “That was a dumb thing to say.” I know that these are not objective statements. I try to take a nap which has the effect of rebooting my brain.

I say this to let you know that if you teach or preach and this happens to you, you are not alone.

On Monday, I find thinking to be a difficult thing to do. There is often little creativity. There is often little patience. There is often little initiative. There is a tendency to argue with comments about the previous day’s performance, especially if those comments are positive. There is a tendency to think of the previous day as a performance.

I say this to let you know that if you teach or preach and this happens to you, you are not alone.

There is little desire to do what Jesus did in these situations, to go off by himself and spend time with his dad. There is little desire to let responsibility for what people do with the teaching rest with them and with God.

I say this to let you know that if you teach or preach and this happens to you, you are not alone.

I’m glad I’m not alone.

Some of us get to Saturday morning, full of energy, full of projects, full of passion to “get something done.” The rest of us get to Saturday morning dragging. We have been busy all week. We are struggling with a list of activities that got longer during the week, rather than shorter. Saturday morning has a list of projects, yes, but it also comes with a list of obligations that is even longer. We drag the tasks from the wee, hoping to get some done before Monday.

Unless we work on the weekend anyway. In which case Saturday is already a work day and full of activities and the longing for time off to match the schedules of our friends.

And we arrive at the weekend exhausted, carrying a backpack full of obligations and eyes full of dreams and a heart that is weary. And God’s response is not to give us the strength to keep pushing through. God’s response is to tell us to forget about that workd for a day a week.

What a burden that is. To have to talk off perfectly good working time in order to obey God? To lose track of all those projects while taking a day to play? To not be productive, on purpose, for one seventh of my waking time?

What kind of system is that!

Wait. What kind of system is leaving everyone I know tired. What kind of system is exhausting people, is putting rings around eyes. What kind of system has me yawning as I write?

Oh. That’s right. A system built about me rather that being built for me.

Jesus invited us to come to him for rest. And so, being the weekend, I invite you to listen to him. With me.

“How is it with your soul?” is a question seeking an answer, trying to help someone else reflect.

“What is the question you don’t want me to ask?” is a question about trust, about helping someone discern what is going on in their heart.

“Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” is a research kind of question. It could lead to a wonderful reflection on what sabbath really means, about what is restful, about the line between restorative activity and work.

Jesus goes that direction, using very clear comparative legal reasoning. “You’ll take care of a sheep. A man is worth more than a sheep. Therefore taking care of a man is acceptable.”

It is clear and accurate…and wasted.

They didn’t care at all about the answer. They cared about trapping Jesus, about finding a reason to kill him.

They asked the question knowing that the better his answer, the more wrong he would be. And he knew that the better his answer was, the more in trouble he would be.

And he didn’t back down. They asked. He answered truthfully and skillfully and then he healed the man. Because for Jesus, this was not an abstract conversation about theology. This was about a man with a hand that needed to be fixed.

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Join me in the mirror for a moment for some more questions:

1. When you know someone has argumentative questions, do you answer or avoid?

2. Is your answer adequate or technically brilliant?

3. Are you more about winning the argument or healing the person that is being used as bait?

4. For the sake of a person, will you risk everything?

Jesus wasn’t looking for a reason. He had one.

If you are in a field and you are hungry and you pick some of the grain and eat it because you are incredibly hungry from living on the move, you are wrong.

Not because if you eat too many oats you’ll get sick like the eight-year-old kid I was in camp with whose name I don’t remember but who ate way too many oats while we were hiking to a cookout and got sick. I mean really sick.

That’s the kind of rule that makes tremendous sense. It protects other 8-year-old boys and their counselors from unnecessary cleanups in the middle of the night. No, this rule said that grabbing some grain just to take the edge off the growling of your stomach counts as full-blown harvesting of grain. And on the Sabbath, harvesting of grain is wrong.

I understand the larger rule. The todo list will never get done. There is a place for rest. There need to be limits. To make, however, grabbing a handul of wheat to chew on a major rule is, it seems, a little over the top.

Which is what Jesus says.

The rule of the Sabbath is, Jesus suggests, a principle. It is better to eat and break the rule than to pass out but be obedient. It is better to look for mercy than to measure the sacrifices. It is better to value people than to build elaborate rule structures that devalue them. It is better to look at what is happening than to blindly apply human rules. It is better to talk with the Maker of the rules than to condemn him.

It is better to be with Jesus in a field on a Sabbath picking grain than anywhere else.

Okay, so I don’t know exactly how he did it. But I do know that he provided exactly the right amount for one day’s food on each of five days. On the sixth day he provided exactly enough for two days. As a result, on the seventh day he didn’t provide any and no one had to collect any.

I thought about the manna in relation to this blog.

I’m exploring following Jesus three-hundred words a day. I started out to write every day. I realized that writing every day doesn’t permit a sabbath, a day of rest, for you or for me.

I realized I could schedule posts ahead of time, but that still puts things into your email or feed reader every day, putting a burden on you and on me to keep up, to answer comments.

I realized that I need to schedule a day to not have to think for this blog.

So my plan is to put up a post on Saturday. This will be for the weekend. That way you can read Saturday or Sunday. And I won’t have to write on Saturday night or for Saturday night.  I think it will bring some freedom.

And I leave you and I with words of Mark Buchanan from The Rest of God:

There is a terrible cost to our busyness. It erodes memory. Or worse than that, it turns good memory into mere nostalgia–memory falsified and petrified–and turns bad memory into bloodhounds that chase us to rend us, that keep us ever running, dodging, backtracking. Busyness destroys the time we need to remember well.

In the confusion, we forget who we are. The broken pieces remain strewn.