A Park in Time

By John Thomas McLarty 

                It wasn’t exactly kidnapping, but I was being transported against my will in the back seat of a blue Datsun.  In the front seat were two women, Mina Gravatt and a friend of hers.  All of us were students at Pacific Union College in northern California. 
                It was spring break.  The girls and I had delivered a truck load of donated clothing, furniture and household appliances to Holbrook Indian Mission School in Arizona.  Now we  were headed back to college, but Mina had this bee in her bonnet about seeing the Grand Canyon.  I protested it was too far out of the way.  I was in a hurry to get back to school, and the side trip from Flagstaff up to the Canyon would add hours to the trip.  And besides, I knew we were in for a disappointment.  Sure, I had seen the pictures.  I had heard the stories.  But I didn’t see how any hole in the ground could ever live up to the kind of hype associated with Grand Canyon.  But what could I say? The car belonged to Mina; we were headed to Grand Canyon.
                At Flagstaff, we turned off Interstate 40 and drove north.  I buried myself in a book, probably something exciting like epistemology in the theology of the Eastern Orthodox Church.  Occasionally I’d sneak a glance out the window.  What I saw confirmed my suspicions.  Pine trees.  An endless blur of trunks and needles. 
                I looked up again when we stopped at the entrance.  Still nothing to see.  Finally we pulled into the parking lot.  Mina and Teresa got out.  I stayed in the back seat, staring at my book, refusing to get sucked into this silly excursion.
                But after a couple of minutes I thought, well, since I’m here I may as well take a look.  Closing the book, I climbed out of the back seat and ambled across the parking lot toward the edge of the canyon.
                As I did, my mouth dropped open.  I walked up to the edge of the canyon.  Sat down on a rock and just stared, dumbstruck with wonder and awe.  I forgot everything I had ever read about the canyon.  I forgot all the pictures I’d seen.  I forgot everything anyone had ever told me.  I was utterly enthralled, enchanted.  I didn’t move until Mina tapped me on the shoulder.  “It’s time to go.”
                Sabbath is like the Grand Canyon.  Grand Canyon is a park in space.  It’s boundaries can be drawn on a map or traced over the landscape.  Sabbath is a park in time.  It’s boundaries are drawn on a calendar or traced in our weeks.  
                Grand Canyon offers a truly special sense of encounter with God. 
                On my second visit to the canyon, I hiked three thousand feet down into the canyon, then out a mile or so on the inner plateau to Tanto point on the edge of the inner gorge which drops another two thousand feet straight down to the Colorado River.  
                For a couple of hours, I just sat there, watching the grandeur.  I kept trying to get my mind around the reality that the great walls surrounding me were not really mountains, but were, in fact, the sides of the ditch I was sitting in.  
                I have read eloquent literature about the canyon.  I’ve stared enchanted at photographs and paintings.  But there is no way to capture with words or film or paint the canyon’s grandeur and immensity.  You have to experience it.  In all that immensity, there is an extraordinary sense of the presence and power of God.
                And the Sabbath is something like that.  No matter how much you hear about the Sabbath, no matter how many words you read about it.  There’s no real understanding of its wonder and value apart from direct experience.
                Another intriguing parallel between Grand Canyon National Park and the Sabbath is that both are much easier to define using negative statements than positive ones.
                What is Grand Canyon?  First of all as a park it’s a place where routine commercial and civic activity is excluded.  You can’t find a mall.  There are no condominiums lining the river at the bottom of the canyon.  And the rim of Tonto Plateau isn’t lined with bed and breakfasts offering gourmet meals, distinctive rooms and fantastic views.  There’s no hospital, no auto repair shops, no Taco Bell or no Burger King.  No city hall.  
                There are some services available in Grand Canyon Village on the South Rim, but for the most part, routine civic and commercial activities are excluded.  
                Notice.  It’s not bad stuff that’s excluded.  Condos and houses, malls and grocery stores, car dealerships and hospitals, landfills and freeways are indispensable components of our society.  They are essential for “the good life” that most of us appreciate. But we exclude these good things from our parks in order to make room for something better–something that gets crowded out in the press of everyday, routine business and government–an extraordinary awareness of the presence and grace of God. 
                Just as a park is defined in negative terms, so is the Sabbath.  Notice the Sabbath commandment (number four of the famous “Ten Commandments”).
                “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.  Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God.  In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your manservant, nor your maidservant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates.  For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day.  Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it” (Exodus 20:8-11).
                Notice how much of this Sabbath commandment is expressed negatively.  Don’t work.  Don’t have your children or servants or animals work.  Don’t.  Don’t. Don’t.
                And it’s the same with a park.  Don’t litter.  Don’t cut across switchbacks.  No fires outside the campground grates.  No dogs on trails.  No off-road driving.  Parks have to be protected by rules.  Imagine what Grand Canyon would look like if regular commercial development were allowed in the park.  Do you really think a pair of Golden Arches would improve the view?  Would the canyon offer the same sense of serenity and magnificence if it were cris-crossed by roads and bridges?  What if dirt bikes and ATVs were allowed to zoom up and down the trails?  Would you enjoy the same sense the presence of God as you hiked the South Kaibab Trail?
                Fixed boundaries and consistent enforcement are a necessary condition for the preservation of the special nature of the park.  And it’s the same with the Sabbath.  The only way for us to enjoy its blessings is for us embrace the firm boundaries set in Scripture. 
                If God had merely suggested the Sabbath as a good idea, who would have the time for it? If God merely gave us permission to take some time off, most of us would say thank you, but realize that we’re just too over-committed to take any time off right now.  So God commanded us to take the time off.  He ordered us to stop our important tasks and take twenty-four hours for fellowship with Him and with our families.
                During college, I took organic chemistry in the summer between my junior and senior years.  Everyone else in the class had already taken the course during the regular school year.  They were repeating it to improve their grade and their chance for admission to med school.  I was taking the class for the first time, and it had been three years since my last chemistry class.  Trying to keep up was tough.  I studied “organic” from eight in the morning until late at night. 
                Before the summer was over I was literally dreaming organic chemistry.  Long strings of equations stretched out across the paper in my mind as I tried futilely to balance them.   There was no way I could afford to take a day off from studying.  I’d fall behind my classmates who were studying seven days a week.  And they had a head start anyway.
                But because of God’s command to keep the Sabbath holy, late Friday afternoons I’d close my books and prepare to welcome the Sabbath.  For twenty-four hours, from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday, I’d remember that I was more than a student.  I was more than a cog in the machinery of education.  I was more than an aspiring physician-to-be.  For twenty-four hours I luxuriated in my status as a child of the king.  My present and my future were in his hands.
                Every week I savored this Sabbath enactment of the gospel.  I rested from my labors.  I rested in God’s accomplishments.  I did not stop studying because I finished all my studying.    I rested because God finished his work long ago and commanded me to join him in his rest.
                The unyielding command and fixed boundaries of the Sabbath liberated me for special communion with God.  If God had merely invited me to rest, I’d have thanked him for the  invitation and kept right on studying.  But since God gave me an order, I was liberated from the tyranny of school.   I was set free to savor the joy of fellowship with God and his people.
                Both the park and the Sabbath are safe-guarded by firm boundaries and strict rules.
                Another significant similarity between Grand Canyon, the park in space, and Sabbath, the park in time is “emptiness.”
                 If you go to Yellowstone National Park, what you notice are things like geysers and elk and bison.  What makes the park special is what’s THERE.  If you go to Smoky Mountain National Park you notice the mountains.  But the thing that makes Grand Canyon special is precisely what’s NOT there.  It’s the absence of cubic miles of rock and dirt that creates the canyon.   Grand Canyon is a magnificent emptiness. 
                In the same way, Sabbath is a magnificent emptiness.  The most obvious feature of Sabbath is what is missing--all the busyness and demands of ordinary life.  The deadlines and pressures of earning a living, maintaining a house, keeping up the yard or fixing your car.  The most obvious feature of Sabbath is emptiness.  The emptiness is visible, it’s noticeable to on-lookers, to other people.  But for the person who is keeping the Sabbath, the most important feature is the sweet presence of God which fills the emptiness created by the Sabbath commandment..  Of course, God is present everywhere and all the time.  But Sabbath, by liberating us from the demands and pressures of ordinary life, offers us opportunity for extraordinary fellowship with our Savior and Creator.