Sabbath Readings (Part 1)
We read these every Saturday night to begin our time of Sabbath. (As best we can, Kenny is in Lebanon right now! Last night I texted him "The Great Cathedral" from below. That's all you can do sometimes!) These are "kid friendly" wordings based on a few paragraphs in Abraham Heschel's book I Asked for Wonder. The language of his book is poetic and beautiful, but I reworded them because it is hard for little ones to understand. We just pick one of the passages to read. Here are two of the 7 passages.
Some religions have special places, we have special times. We have the Sabbath each week as a time that is set apart- holy. We celebrate other special days each year too, where we learn more about God and realize how much we need Him. We don't need a special building to get to know God- we need time. And when we follow the routine and rhythm of Sabbath and God's holy days each year, we find the time we need. We become so attached to these special times, we wonder how we ever lived without it.
The Seed of Eternity
If you want to start the Sabbath off right, like a day that is really special, the first thing you must do is stop all the things that make you busy. Our work is not really that important and it never seems to end anyway, so one day a week we stop all the things that make us tired and busy. If our days go on and on with no rest, it is like a bad sounding song with high screeching notes and our bodies and minds start to feel really tired. We start to want more and more things and stuff we don’t need starts to fill up our life. We think all this work to get more stuff will make us happy, but it ends up making us sad. On the Sabbath, we say bye-bye to our jobs and chores and we learn that God created everything around us and He doesn’t need our help to keep the world spinning.
Six days a week we try to get everything done that needs to be done. On the Sabbath, we are taking special care of our soul that is inside us. God has put a little bit of heaven in our souls- it’s like a little seed that grows into a big tree. We know we can see and touch the world around us, but we also know that our souls are connected to Someone Else that we cannot see.
Six days a week we are always trying to get a lot of things done, but on the seventh day, the Sabbath day, we try to stop ourselves from doing any work.
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