Something Amazing

Keep the Sabbath day holy.
Isaiah 58:13a NLT
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My youngest son has recently become fascinated with the movie The Incredibles. (He’s watching it right now for the 5th time this week.) There’s one scene that he is extremely interested in. The Dad – Mr. Incredible incognito – comes home from a rough day at work to find a random neighbor boy sitting in his driveway on a tricycle staring at him. Mr. Incredible gets out of his car and crankily yells at him “Well?! What are you waiting for?” The neighbor boy quietly mumbles his response: “I don’t know… something amazing, I guess.”

Now my son wanders around the house mumbling “I don’t know… something amazing, I guess.”

And some days I do it, too.

I drive to the store on the hunt for something amazing. I open my fridge looking for something amazing. I scroll Facebook seeking something amazing. I research my presidential voting options in hopes of something amazing. I have attended workshops and gone far from home in pursuit of something amazing.

They searched for it in Biblical times, too. The prophet Isaiah speaks about it in chapter 58 of his book in the Bible. The people were fasting in the pursuit of something amazing. They were hoping to earn God’s favor by following a proper tradition of fasting in one area of their lives and ignoring God in all the others. (It reminded me of how often I also do that – attend church one hour a week and then go home and argue with my family the rest of the other hours of the week.)

At the very end of chapter 58, God reminds his people how you truly find your something amazing:

Keep the Sabbath day holy. Don’t pursue your own interests on that day, but enjoy the Sabbath and speak of it with delight as the LORD’s holy day. Honor the LORD in everything you do, and don’t follow your own desires or talk idly. If you do this, the LORD will be your delight. (Isaiah 58:13-14a NLT)

The Sabbath: a time (not a building or an hour of mindless pew sitting) set aside to stop trying to define/find my something amazing and instead rest in THE Amazing. He built into our basic operating systems a desire to seek awesomeness and he didn’t leave that desire unfulfilled – he is it. In all the moments that I’ve wanted this abstract amazing to come along and save me from a mundane life of sitting in someone else’s driveway, staring and waiting, I just needed to pause and realize He was already there.

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Dear Lord, thank you for giving me a desire to seek you and to know you as my something amazing. Thank you for reminding me that I need to regularly take a break from trying to define, achieve, and conquer. Help me take time each day to Sabbath – to rest in your Amazing Grace. Amen.