Will you let it change you?

Here's what Saturday morning used to look like for me:

I’d get up at 5:00AM to make myself breakfast and work on publishing my Sunday reflection on the readings on my website before getting dressed to go to my gym to workout. My children and husband would wake up sometime before I left. The children would go straight to watching cartoons for the first time all week and my husband would go straight to his X-Box. As my four homebodies relaxed and unwound from the week, I would leave and go workout, get my coffee fix at Starbucks, and then take my time going to all the grocery stores for the week.

Believe it or not, I absolutely love grocery shopping.

I would wander the aisles listening to an audiobook or podcast and select all the fruits, vegetables, and meats we needed for the week. And then, I would come home and organize everything just so in the kitchen.

That is definitely not how Saturday looked for me this week. Instead of being able to get up and go, I was being asked to rest. In fact, the world was literally begging me to stay home.

I don’t know about you, but that was a really hard adjustment to make. I liked my Saturday mornings just the way they were.

As I was looking at today’s readings, I was struck by a one line in the Gospel – “Night is coming when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” It was the Sabbath, and in Jesus’s time, people really took that seriously. You were not supposed to work. You were supposed to spend your time in prayer and with family, relaxing. And while He knew everyone else was honoring the Sabbath, Jesus was performing miracles. He was saying “You rest and let me be the light.”

Obviously, not everyone is resting right now. There are scientists and doctors and emergency personnel working hard so that we can all eventually leave this extended Sabbath and rejoin the life we once knew. They are being the light. The rest of us, however, are just… resting.

And like the Lord’s work in this Gospel, it would all be for naught if we didn’t come out the other side changed.

Jesus healed a man who had been blind from birth. He profoundly changed his life. And His work had the possibility of profoundly changing the lives of all who witnessed it – if they only let it.

I’ve noticed already a few other things changing in my routines over the last week. First of all, I am wasting a whole lot less paper towels. As I look at my small supply dwindling, I find myself consciously deciding when using a paper towel is necessary and when it is not. I am also pausing to hug my children more (social distancing not a thing inside my house) and listen to what they have to say – after all, we have a lot of time to listen. And I am not rushing into my day or rushing into bed at the end of it.

I have been forced to slow down and think whether I like it or not.

So, the question is – will I let it change me?

Will you let it change you?

Author: Gretchen Crowder, Director of Campus Ministry