The start of Eternity

Here is an excellent essay by Aunt Melanie that I found today at her blog Repentance and Ascent. Though I am quoting it here in its entirety, I recommend you visit her blog for more good testimonies like this one.

Remember The Sabbath And Keep It Holy
Bracker (1924), Source

Working on the Sabbath

by Aunt Melanie

There was a time in America when everything was closed on Sundays. I grew up with that concept of the Sabbath and keeping it holy. Even if it was not kept holy, it was a different kind of day because all the stores were closed. It was a day when people, church-goers and otherwise, would read the newspaper, make fried chicken or lasagna or tamales, suspend the weekday duties and the Saturday busyness, and sense the Resurrection of Christ even through doubts and lapses and other priorities.

As I became an adult, few stores remained closed on Sundays. Eventually, I started working every day, as did many of my colleagues as a matter of survival, convenience, unbelief, or sin. No day was the Sabbath for me, or all days were a Sabbath. I always worked, had to, but I always prayed and always thought about God. Nonetheless, everything got tumbled and jumbled. Everything got combined, with chunks of the Sabbath here and there, never entirely neglected and yet never fully respected. Nothing was closed on Sundays, including my heart.

Today, I am writing this essay on the Sabbath. Nothing is closed, but I have closed my life to the unconsecrated influences of the world. I do not judge those who work on Sunday—we need hospitals and firefighters and 24-hour plumbers. I do not judge those who are trying to survive—teachers who are grading papers and accountants at their calculators. I do not judge myself, but trust that God understood my intentions and forgave my priorities and lack of faith.

After all these years, I am again at my desk on the Sabbath—but, this time, not working for money and survival. I write almost as I pray and eat and breathe. It is what I do. It is who I am. Everything is opened. All things are possible. There is a new creation in Christ. Only the past is closed, absolved and no longer operative. Today is here and it is all that I have—the Sabbath, openness to all that is holy and acceptable, a resurrected and living Christ, renewal and transformation, and the start of Eternity.