A Breath of Fresh Air

How about the weather these last two days? Monday and Tuesday have felt like spring! And I am most thankful, not just for the warmth itself, but for how the warmth has beckoned me to breathe fresh air. Monday afternoon found our family on a lovely walk, breathing in more such air than we have for many days. And today (Tuesday), after many weeks breathing the stale, re-circulated, indoor air of a cooped up winter, windows are opened wide, allowing both home and office (and their occupants!) to breathe the fresh breaths of spring! And how good such breaths are, both for mind and body!

And it occurs to me that we can speak similarly about “a Sabbath well spent”.* It occurs to me that, after six days of breathing what often feels like stagnant air – after six days in the office; after six days in the rat race; after six days of toil; after six days of paperwork, or computer screens, or deadlines, or sweat, or stress, or pressure, or difficult co-workers – “a Sabbath well spent” (a  Sabbath used in the way God intended it, in other words) can be a breath of fresh air! It can be like the throwing open of windows, or the taking of a brisk spring walk, after a week trapped indoors.

Think of it that way! Think of your Sunday opportunities – for physical rest, for praise (at church and at home), for prayer, for sitting under the preached word, for fellowship, for edifying reading – think of them as a weekly fresh air walk, or as the flinging open of the windows, so that the draft of a different and healthier air can blow through the corridors of your life. Think of Sunday as a spiritual fresh air day!

Strive, yes, to breathe more and more of that air, seven days a week! But recognize that, if some days and weeks are more like a cooped up January, there is always a fresh-air day just around the corner! There is always this one day on which you don’t have to breathe the same old air, as it were – a day on which you are entitled (and commanded!) to get out of the rat race; to lay down the labors of the rest of the week, and to throw open the aforementioned spiritual windows of praise, fellowship, the word, and so on!

So commit to doing so!  

Commit, first of all, to setting aside your normal labors on the Lord’s Day – which is commanded, by the way, even if those labors are not stressful, or like stagnant air!  This commitment is right and healthy, whether you think you need to get away from your work or not!  And, if the Monday-Saturday routine is stressful or stagnant, such a commitment will get you, one day a week, out of the stale air!   

And commit your Sundays also, not just to getting out of the rat-race, but to positively breathing the fresh air!  Commit to open the windows, or to go on a fresh-air walk, so to speak.  Commit, in other words, to really do the things that make Sunday a breath of fresh air!  Breathe that air in – by means of rest, praise, prayer, fellowship, the word, and solid Christian books. Don’t sit, on a spring-like day, in the same stagnant air in which you’ve been languishing. Breathe the fresh air!


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*I quote this phrase from Matthew Hale’s classic poem “a Sabbath well spent”. In this poem, Hale rightly points out how a well-spent Sabbath brings contentment and health for the week that follows, though I have used his words  in writing about the blessing of the Sabbath coming on the heels of the week that was.