In the little community in Washington State where I grew up, most people weren’t religious, but there a were a few persons with various religious backgrounds, and I saw a handful of persons trying to keep the Sabbath in their own ways. One family turned back the church of the wife’s childhood for comfort and strength at the time that their tiny daughter was dying with leukemia.
This was a church that believed there was special benefit from holding their Sabbath worship on the Hebrew Sabbath–that is, Saturday. The nearest congregation was an hour’s drive away. Their farm was a couple of miles beyond our place on the same road. So at about 8 am every Saturday, we saw their family loaded in their car and heading for church, and we would see the car returning home in the late afternoon. Besides the long day at church, there was not a sign any outside farm work being done in their fields on Saturdays. My dad believed that the father in this family had a history of not being a particularly industrious farmer, but thought he saw this man making a special point of working a long day in his fields on Sunday, he supposed, to make some kind of point about his new-found religious commitment. For myself, I felt some admiration for them in their attempt to establish a standard for themselves which was different from the community.
Lessen #1: Trying to keep the Sabbath may make a person stand out and seem different.
In my early experience, there were people from several different religious traditions trying in their own ways to keep the Sabbath. I sense that things have changed. In our Church we may have to stand alone.
Witness BYU’s position on not playing competitive sports on Sunday and how difficult this seems to be making the finding of a football conference. I wonder why universities such as Southern Methodist, Baylor (Baptist), TCU (Church of Christ) are not standing with us on avoiding Sunday play.
But If Not...
According to one Jewish author, refraining from work in the Sabbath day had a very significant meaning anciently to the Jewish people. The animals had to work constantly to have the food needed for subsistence. When people kept the Sabbath Day by refraining from any labor on that day, they demonstrated their superiority to the animal kingdom. Humans are not slaves to their physical needs; they can rise above the level of beasts, as they choose to devote a portion of their time to higher things, to worship, to spiritual development.
Lesson #2: A basic part of keeping the Sabbath is to find ways to rise above the routine weekday
work and activities on Sunday.
From a part member family--mother member, father not–living a distance from a branch of the Church–about the only family in the community with connections to the LDS church.
My mother chose to take her children to the only church in the community, a community Bible
church affiliated loosely with the Presbyterian church.
I also remember Sundays as a baseball day. My dad loved the game and played with our local baseball team until he was in his 40s. On Sundays in the summers, we would usually go to Sunday School in the morning at the Community church and then go over to the ball field which was nearby at the High School and watch the Glenwood town team play a game of baseball. Most of the people watched the game from their cars parked along the left field and right field foul lines. I gathered with the little boys behind the backstop, where we chased foul balls and returned them for a nickle. I also liked being able to stand behind the backstop to see what stuff the pitchers had.
Eventually my Dad started to join the rest of us at Sunday School most Sundays. And one day he surprised us all. He said that he wasn’t going to do work on our farm on Sunday any more. He said his reason was that so many things broke down or went wrong when he tried to do farm work on Sunday that he didn’t get anything done anyway. So this became the new rule in our family – no farm work on Sunday (except for required care of our animals, of course).
But there was one other exception. He said, “I won’t work for myself on Sunday, but I will work
for someone else who needs my help.”
Most of the men in our community were part-time farmers but also had outside jobs. They worked together to help each other as best they could. And sometimes there were projects that required quite a few hands, such as threshing a field of oats. The only time that there were enough men available was on Saturdays or Sundays, and the harvest had to be done when ready.
So, “I won’t work for myself on Sunday, but I will work for someone else who needs my help.”
While this may not be the perfect example for Sabbath keeping, it helped me begin to get a sense about the Sabbath, that there are times that important judgments need to be made, especially when someone else needs service. It may not always be possible live the Sabbath by a set of rigid, predetermined rules of do’s and don’ts. Christ taught something like this, when criticized by the Jewish leaders for considering the healing of a man on the Sabbath:
11 And he said unto them, What man shall there be among you, that shall have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out?
12 How much then is a man better than a sheep? Wherefore it is lawful to do well on the sabbath days. (Matthew 12:11-12)
Lesson #3: Sometimes (always?) we need to be flexible and to be guided by the Spirit as we decide what we should or shouldn’t on the Sabbath.
Its very personal and individual. I have found that it helped to ask myself the question about things I should or shouldn’t do on the Sabbath: Will this bring me closer to God and welcome the continued presence of His Spirit in my life? Or better yet Elder Nelson’s question: What sign do I want to give to God this Sabbath day?
I spoke earlier of how we loved baseball in my family. I played on the high school team and did well enough, but I was a year younger than my class and kind of skinny kid and didn’t hit with much power. Just after my 17th birthday I graduated from high school. Several of us seniors were invited to join the Town Team, the same team my dad had played for when I was small. By this time, I had grown to my full height and had begun to add a few muscles. It was late May and as I started attending the Town Team practices I noticed that something different was happening as I took batting practice. The ball seemed to fly off my bat in a new way. I watched my drives consistently going deep into the outfield or even beyond the fence. It was almost magical and I think the older men on the team were also taking notice.
Early in the first of June we had a visitor drop in. It was the Branch President who had made the one-hour drive to our place with an invitation. He said to me and my younger sister, “We have reserved the baptismal font at the Hood River Ward for a branch baptismal service on Saturday. Why don’t you come and be baptized?”
I had been praying for this opportunity since I was 8 years old. My father had opposed our being baptized until were grown up enough to make a mature decision but now gave his approval. We made the 90 minute drive to Hood River and they baptized us and confirmed us members of the Church.
Over the next few days I pondered the implications of what had happened. Things has changed. I had made promises to the Lord that I needed to try to keep. The Town Team played all of its games on Sunday. I knew that I just covenanted to be obedient to commandments that included keeping the Sabbath Day holy, and spending my Sundays playing baseball games seemed now to not fulfill that expectation. So I made the choice that I felt I had to make and retired from the Town Team. You might say that I had retired from baseball at age 17.
From that circumstance Sabbath Day observance took on a lot of meaning to me. I had had to sacrifice something dear to me to keep my baptismal promise. Therefore the things I did or didn’t do on the Sabbath took on more meaning. It was like my Sunday actions were a sort of offering I was making to the Lord. They were like the tokens of my covenant of obedience, sort of like the whole of the Sabbath being an extension of the taking of the sacrament as an act of covenant renewal. It seemed as if the entire day became the sacrament, perhaps in the spirit of the Lord’s instruction to the Prophet Joseph:
12 But remember that on this, the Lord’s day, thou shalt offer thine oblations and thy sacraments unto the Most High, confessing thy sins unto thy brethren, and before the Lord.
13 And on this day thou shalt do none other thing, only let thy food be prepared with singleness of heart that thy fasting may be perfect, or, in other words, that thy joy may be full.
14 Verily, this is fasting and prayer, or in other words, rejoicing and prayer....
16 Verily I say, that inasmuch as ye do this, the fulness of the earth is yours.... (D&C 59)
If you reviewed the April Conference talk by Elder Nelson in the last Ward Bulletin, he reminds us that the Sabbath was given to Israel “as a perpetual covenant, a constant reminder that the Lord may sanctify his people.”
Lesson #4: Seeing the keeping of the Sabbath for the full day as an opportunity to make and renew my covenant with the Lord.
But a bigger test was in the works, with more discoveries about keeping the Sabbath. I had been offered a scholarship to Washington State University and other schools had shown interest, but after my baptism there was a spirit that whispered that I needed to attend BYU. While getting an education I could also become educated about the Church and immerse myself in it. That would take money. Ours was an area of small farms and logging. The major logging company in our area was quite generous in offering jobs to local kids at full union rates and the union was generous also in waving their usually fees so we could work. The pay was sufficient for me, while living at home, to save enough money in a summer to nearly pay the cost of a year at BYU.
The setting was beautiful. However, the work was dirty, sometimes dangerous, and the human
environment was terrible. The men were hard, vulgar, and profane. The man I was paired with on the logging crew was all of that plus a verbal bully. There was a long dusty one-hour ride back and forth on the company bus to the work location each day and I was the only non-smoker. I would sit in the back with my hands over my face to try to filter out the smoke in the air. I did this for the next three summers, because I knew that it was my ticket to a better life, both job-wise and also spiritually.
We were working 6 day weeks with Sunday off. The Sabbath saved me. It gave me strength to endure.
Here is Lesson #5: When I totally cleared my mind of the challenges of the work week and devoted Sunday to spiritual things, I was refreshed and renewed in my heart and mind so that I could endure another awful week in the woods.
Race, Priesthood, and Temple Blessings--
3 months ago
