Like so many other things Sunday has changed dramatically over the years. As a youngster, after church we would go home for lunch and spend the afternoon visiting or napping. No work was done on Sunday unless it was an emergency and there was no shopping. Home-owned stores were closed so their families could attend church and rest in the afternoon.

I thought of those “good ole days” when I read the following. . . .

WHY WE SHOULD REST ON THE SABBATH

My great-grandmother was a lifelong Baptist. Mother Ollie, as we called her, attended Mass at my family’s Catholic church in Birmingham, too, but she never drifted from her quiet adherence to the King James ways of her youth.

After church every Sunday, she went straight back to her room. On other days, she was always busy—shelling peas or snapping beans, crocheting or quilting or sewing. Her foot-pedal Singer was in daily use until a few weeks before her death in 1982, but she never sewed on Sunday.

When I went looking for her help with a tatting project one Sunday afternoon, I found out why. Tatting is a kind of lace made of tiny knots tied in very fine string. The trick is to tie the right kind of knot without tangling the string into the wrong kind, but I had made so many of the wrong knots that I couldn’t even figure out how to unpick the tangle and start again. I found her sitting in a chair, her Bible in her lap. The book was very old, with edges so worn they curved inward toward the pages, as soft as a puppy. I knocked on the open door. “Mother Ollie, can you help me with this?”

“Not today, honey,” she said. “The Lord tells us not to work on the Sabbath.” And handwork, by definition, is work.

I don’t know anyone who takes Sunday off anymore. If we aren’t doing professional work, we’re doing the housework that won’t get done once Monday comes. But it’s not as though the world stopped on Sunday back in Alabama either. The crops—and the weeds—in my grandfather’s fields continue to grow, whatever the day. My grandmother, a teacher, still had papers to grade and lessons to plan. The peas in the basket on the back porch would not shell themselves. Nevertheless, my people put work aside on Sunday to nap on a daybed or sit on the porch and rock. They didn’t themselves, as I do, wonder whether they could “afford” to rest. God obliged them to rest, and so they did.

Today, there are many people for whom this kind of Sabbath is not an option. People who work double shifts—or double jobs—truly can’t afford to rest. On the other hand, I could reorganize my life if I tried. I could focus on priorities, spend less time on things that matter little to me and make more time for those that matter most. Yet somehow I have reached the age of 57 without feeling any obligation to sit still. . . .

Reader’s Digest

It might be a blessing if we would return to the “good old days” and once again enjoy a day of rest.

With Thanksgiving next week, this seemed the appropriate time to share the following….

INGRATITUDE

One of the basest of all sins is ingratitude.

Dr. William L. Stidger tells about a happening during the depression of the 30s when he was bemoaning with his friends how hopeless everything was. Hunger, mass unemployment, banks closed, formerly rich men jumping out of windows.

“There’s just not much to be thankful for,” one of the friends remarked.

Stidger replied: “Well, I for one am grateful to Mrs. Wendt.” Mrs. Wendt was a schoolteacher who thirty years before had gone out of her way to encourage him in his studies. “Did you ever thank her?” someone asked. He hadn’t. But that night he wrote her.

In a week or so this answer came, written in the shaky hand of an aged person:

“My dear Willie: I want you to know what your note meant to me. I am an old lady in my eighties living alone in a small room, cooking my own meals, lonely and seeming like the last leaf on the tree.

“You will be interested to know, Willie, that I taught school for fifty years and in all that time, yours is the first letter of appreciation I have ever received. It came on a blue, cold morning and it cheered my lonely old heart as nothing has cheered me in many years.”

One of the major regrets of my life is my failure to express gratitude. Not only to those who have meant much to me but to those, some of whom I didn’t even know, who sacrificially gave of themselves and their substance to make this a better world because they were here.

In some cases, I had good intentions. I fully intended, some day, to go visit those teachers I admired so much. Miss Oehmig, Miss Hill, Miss Guill, Drs. Gus Dyer, Donald Davidson, etc.

“Thanksgiving.” We get off work. We have the family in for turkey. It’s a holiday. It’s a holiday —and to most of us — a virtually meaningless holiday.

Instead of a thankful day we should have a thankful year; a continuous thankfulness that we were, by the accident of birth, born into the greatest nation in human history; that God and our Founding Fathers gave us the greatest system of government, the highest degree of freedom, and the highest standard of living ever known in human history.

Thanksgiving. And eternally more vital than expressing our appreciation for our friends, educators, benefactors and patriots, is that we daily—not annually—express our gratitude for Him who gave His life for us, that all who believe in Him shall have eternal life.

--American Way Features