Sabbath Rest and Making Moments

At Sea with Justin McRoberts

You have used the phrase or heard the phrase, 'let's make some memories' or 'let's make some moments.' If you pay attention to the podcast, you know that for the last few weeks, I've been thinking a lot about the passage of time. It's one of the things that came up a lot as I wrote the book Sacred Strides. I'm not just thinking about the way we experience time; I'm thinking especially about how we experienced the time that has passed. And I think, less than experiencing time, the way the calendar dictates it in blocks and then lists, I think we experience time more. So in moments, these clusters of emotional explosion, or implosion, in my reckoning, I think these life moments happen in two ways. Or at least for me, they do. There are probably several more; this is just my little spectrum. One of those ways is moments, I find myself in things like birthdays, or finish lines, you will get tired of me talking about turning 50 This year, but I do; I turned 50. This year, it's a big deal for me. I'm having a moment. My son, this week, turned 13 years old. He's now officially a teenager. That's a moment. Finish lines are a moment I crossed the finish line of a half marathon, I was having a moment. publishing this book was a moment. Now these are things in which these are moments in which I find myself that other people, to some degree, have set up; I'm sort of in the moment. But the Publisher Set the deadline for the publishing of the book. And I didn't turn my son like butter until he turned 13. That's just how things happen biologically over the course of weeks, months, and years. Those are the moments that are orchestrated by other people or other systems around us. Sometimes those moments are random; you look up while dancing and think, oh, my gosh, I feel fully alive right now. And you're having a moment. What makes these moments tricky is that they require us to recognize them. They're just happening all the time. Yeah, we can have the birthday on the calendar. But we do that because we know that at that moment, I'm going to want to pay attention, which is to say, I'm going to want to offer myself more completely in that space. Because I want to know that this is important. While it's happening, that's kind of what makes that moment, a moment that I know it's important. While it's happening. Learning to live that way. And to recognize those moments is a practice of awareness and receptivity. And one of the things a regular practice of rest does is it provides space in which I can practice this kind of awareness and receptivity. That before too many days have passed, I can stop, and I can look back at a few days and let my soul catch up with me and say, That was really good, or That sucked. Or, man, I missed that. The sacred book strides are itself a collection of moments; it was necessary that as those moments arrived, and especially in the short times afterward, I actively created space to hold those moments differently, more intentionally. And learning to live that way, in a posture of awareness. And a posture of receptivity is actually what sets me up for the second kind of moment, the ones I get to set up and set out to make with those that I care about. I don't want to live my life more deeply now that I know, or at least think I know, that I experienced my life this way in these clusters of emotional memory. I'm conscious of that in my planning. And I think specifically, I think strategically about how I might set myself up and set myself up with those I care about to have and Sharon, those kinds of moments, the kinds of moments that actually enrich and deepen our lives. It goes really quickly, friends, this life. One of the ways we slow down this passage of time so that we don't look up and think Oh, my God, where did it all go? Because we slow down to recognize the moments we're in, recreate space in our lives to look back at the time that has passed, so that it didn't just pass, we can see ourselves in our lives. We're living right there. And then plan for a future for the next week, the next month, or the next year. These are the people I want to be thinking about when the clock is running out. These are the memories I want to have when I look back on those last few times. And take that deep breath and be thankful that I got to live it all in order to have that end-of-life experience. I have to slow down, recognize the moments that I'm in while I have them, to be thankful enough, not just that I had them, that I would plan to have more of them. So that, the end of all things, I had more fully lived the life I actually had while I had it. That's why I wrote the book. It's not just a way to get my ideas out into the world; it's a way for me to invite you into the practice of slowing down, paying attention, and billing, being fully present to the life you're living a good, deep, rich, beautiful life. That'll take some planning, it'll take some sacrifice, it'll take pulling time away from systems that would just steal every minute of your life for their benefit. It'll take putting down the damn phone. It'll mean thinking really specifically and strategically about who makes you feel alive and who doesn't. And then making plans to spend more time with the people on the first list. So I hope that this podcast, this moment we're in right now, can be a stopping point. And I hope that the book itself can provide a few stopping points for you to look deeply into the beautiful good life you've been handed; I hope to challenge and invite you into the practice of regular rest of Sabbath Keeping. Not so that you can get better for the work that you're doing and not so that you can just wake up more refreshed, to give yourself back to the same machinery, but instead so that as time passes, you would have fully lived the life you've been given the incredible gift of a life you've been given.

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