Have You Even Showered Yet?

Today while refusing to get out of bed on time, I flipped from The Weather Channer to Fox News. I used to use Fox as my alarm channel, but there is something soothing about The Weather Channel, which Fox lacks. In spite of Heidi Cullen's campaign to destroy the careers of meteorologists who disagree with her about global warming.

Greg Gutfeld and some other Internet personality were guests on Fox and Friends. The host said they were going to look at Youtube videos. He joked that Gutfeld scoured the Internet for material all day every Sunday, because he had nothing better to do.

I thought about that. Sunday is like that for many Americans. A wasted day. You get drunk and have fun on Friday night. You rest and recover from your hangover on Saturday. Sunday rolls around, and you lie in bed with a newspaper.

This is what people do, while refusing to give one weekend day to God. It's what I've generally done. Lying in bed with a newspaper, or barbecuing, or watching sports, is better than a day of rest and devotion.

I am here to tell you, it's no bargain. You can use that time to rest AND improve yourself AND heal and strengthen your family. Sleeping until noon, or slouching around drunk on a lawn chair is not a good substitute.

People have all sorts of stubborn problems. Addiction. Divorce. Bad relationships with their kids. Depression. Anxiety. Loneliness. Boredom. Miserable jobs. The sensation that life is meaningless. We look for answers all the time. Psychiatrists. Physicians. Prostitutes. Hobbies. Cults. Fast living. Oprah. My belief is that we have these problems because we don't have proper relationships with God. These are problems to which God is the natural and effective solution. Without Him, we are SUPPOSED to have these problems. A miserable person will look for ten different inadequate remedies for ten different challenges, instead of praying to the one God who can fix everything. We get a little relief here and there, but it's illusory. It's usually temporary, or it's not really satisfying, or it has a cost so high, it's not worth it. The Godless life is like communism; it offers a promise it never keeps. The communists were supposed to take over the world, and every time they made a trivial bit of progress, they took it as encouragement. Now that's all in ruins. The same thing applies to other ineffective solutions that come from earthly sources.

I remember trying drugs to fix ADD. What a disaster. It ruined my chances of becoming a physicist. And I thought I was a Christian at the time. I don't know why I didn't make a better effort to use my faith. Anyway, it's a great example of a very hard problem that human solutions can't fix. It was amazing, how resilient my ADD was. At first 10 milligrams of Ritalin fixed it. Eventually, I could take over a hundred per day and not get relief. Wellbutrin worked for a while. First thing you know, I was taking two and a half times the maximum dose in a desperate effort to make my mind work. After that, I found that a tiny dose of Prozac that most people wouldn't even feel affected me right away and drove me around the bend for weeks.

Why didn't I just find a church? At the very least, I could have prayed more and gotten my life right. Things would have worked out. Maybe I would have had to give up physics anyway. But I would have had peace, and a door would have opened eventually.

A weekly day of devotion would have helped me toward my goal. Instead, I lay around watching TV and playing Duke Nukem on the Internet. Wow, that paid off real good.

Businesses have meetings even when they're going well, don't they? I think the sabbath fulfills the same purpose. Meet up with God. Remember your priorities. Look for problems. Find encouragement. Fill out a TPS report.

Okay, don't do that last part.

Obscure reference.

Maybe I should publish a Talmud to help people understand this blog.

The sad thing about earthly answers is that they work so well for short times. It's hard to quit when you think you could get it right with just a little more effort. Ask the socialists.

It seems like every week, I get a new lesson on what Jews go through on shabbat. This week? How it feels when you think you didn't get enough done during the previous six days. I would really like to make myself some .38 Super ammunition today; I felt like I was finally getting on top of the reloading situation. But it's going to have to wait, most likely. I don't rigidly enforce my policy of not doing anything that isn't God-related, and if I feel like I need a break, I might spend an hour with the press. But at the moment, it's not in my plans.

I hope some of you will give the sabbath a try, and also that you'll find someone better qualified than I to teach you about it. You may be surprised. Like a lot of the things God wants us to do, it sounds like a tax, but it ends up feeling like a gift.