TWO

A BEAUTIFUL MIND:
Stopping to Think Anew

In my early days as a pastor, I possessed a dangerous combination of naiveté and cockiness. I was untrained for this work—it’s a long story—and yet somehow that produced in me the opposite effect of what it should have. Instead of modesty, I exuded brashness, and instead of caution, rashness. I was a mix of foolhardy and swagger. I had my Bible, a couple of arts degrees, a gift for gab.

What more did I need?

So when a woman called about her twelve-year-old stepson, Jason, and described to me his unruliness, I confidently assured her that a quick session or two with me would fix the problem.

The next day, the woman and Jason showed up in my office. They typically had nothing to do with churches or pastors, but the woman was desperate and broke and had nowhere else to turn. She sat at seat’s edge, weary and jittery, words scattering from her like flak. Jason slumped in his chair, sullen and monosyllabic.

The stepmom recited a litany of the stepson’s wrongdoing: Outright defiance. Abusive language. Extreme withdrawal. Vandalism—smashing plates, kicking holes in walls and doors, keying cars, thrashing the cat. Threats and violence toward her and her daughter. Stealing money from her purse. Stealing her jewelry and pawning it. Cannabis seeds in his jeans pockets. And now, what had prompted the call, getting caught shoplifting. The police had brought him home handcuffed.

After five minutes of this, I knew I was out of my depth.

The stepmom kept cataloging, with mounting shrillness, Jason’s myriad and random acts of badness (all the while he sat there limp and silent, as though dying from a bullet wound). Then she stopped. She was ready now for me to fix it all, just as I’d promised.

I swallowed hard and said, “Um.”

I shuffled the papers on my desk. I arranged the pens there in interesting geometrical designs: squares, triangles, hexagons, intersected diamonds. I took a breath and said, “Um.”

And then, slowly and piecemeal, just playing for time, I began to sort out the story of how they ended up in the same household. It was a tale of family brokenness stretching back for generations. Jason’s mother was a drug addict, and later a prostitute. She had Jason when she was only a teenager and left him and his father when Jason was only months old.

Later, when Jason was about five years old, she came back. By then Jason’s father had remarried, and the stepmom—this woman before me—was caring for the boy. But Jason’s birth mother wanted her baby back. She wanted to be a good mom. She wanted to start a home, settle down, make a life for both of them.

And she tried. She tried for almost a month. But she was overwhelmed by it. She got angry at every little thing. She resented the money and time it took to be a parent. She was dangerously negligent, leaving Jason alone while she went out with her male friends.

Three weeks into it, she abandoned the idea of motherhood. She left once more, never to be seen or heard from since.

Now I was really out of my depth. My temptation was to look at my watch, announce their hour was up, thank them for coming, and show them the door. Instead, I started praying, eyes open: “Oh God, what now? It’s my turn. I’m supposed to be wise. I’m supposed to help these people. But I’ve got nothing to give. Lord, you see their plight. You see mine. I’m sorry I thought I was equal to this. I’m not. You are. Help.”

And then I prayed this: “Lord, please give me the wisdom of Solomon.”

What dropped into my head right then, bright as a coin falling into water, was a story about Solomon. Solomon, the Bible says, was the wisest man on earth. His wisdom surpassed all who came before him and all who came after. It was of such renown that kings and queens traveled from great distances to sit at Solomon’s feet and drink in his words. It was of such enduring substance that, distilled into proverbs, it still guides parents, pastors, teachers, politicians, leaders.

Legendary wisdom.

But the Bible gives only one example of it in action. It’s the story of two prostitutes who come to Solomon for a ruling. The girls have been roommates, each the mother of a son. One child has died. Both claim to be the mother of the surviving child. They’ve fought bitterly over this. Their grievance has reached the place where only the wisest man in the world can bring resolution.

And so they seek audience with Solomon. The women’s rivalry and controversy are so combustible they erupt right there, in the king’s court. In response, the king himself erupts. “Bring me a sword!” he hollers. “Cut this child in two; give half to each.”

This from the wisest man on earth.

I’m praying with my eyes open, asking for the wisdom of Solomon, and in pops this story. I’m puzzled. It seems to me that Solomon just wanted this thing over with, these squabbling women and this squalling child out of his way—not unlike my wanting Jason and his stepmom gone. It seems to me he’s merely run out of patience.

Then the lights go on.

“Jason,” I say, “look at me.”

He does, halfhearted.

“No, Jason. Really look at me. I need you to listen very carefully.”

A slight stirring beneath the crust of his apathy.

“Are you listening?”

He nods.

“All right. There’s a story in the Bible about a king, a very wise king, so wise that everyone in the whole earth sought his wisdom. His name was Solomon. Ever heard about him?”

No.

“Well,” I continue, “he was very wise. But there’s only one story we have to prove it. It’s a strange story, about two women with one child. Both claim to be the child’s mother. Neither will give way— and, of course, they both can’t be the mother, can they?”

No.

“Right. So the two women come to this wise king Solomon to have him sort it out. Now, if I were Solomon, here’s what I’d do: I’d order an investigation. I’d call for DNA tests. Or I’d cross-examine these two women with such skill and cunning that I’d tease out one or the other’s deceit.

“But Solomon doesn’t do this. He does something that seems reckless. He asks for a sword and proposes to cut the baby in two and give half to each woman.”

I pause. The story’s oddness blooms thick in the silence.

“Jason, are you still listening?”

Yes.

“A funny thing happens next. One of the women steps up and says, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let this thing go this far. Give the baby to her.’ See, Solomon calls their bluff, and it works.

“Now, Jason, I have a question. Ready?”

Yes.

“Who do you think was the real mother?”

Jason answered without blinking: “The woman who gave the child away.”

“Jason, you’re right. How did you know?”

“Well,” he said, “because she didn’t want the baby killed.”

“Because she loved him?”

“Right,” he said.

“Right,” I said. “She loved her child so much, she’d rather see him alive and whole in another woman’s arms than dead and dismembered in her own.

“Jason, was that your mother? Was that what she did with you? She’d rather lose you by giving you away than lose you in a worse way by trying to keep you?”

The things you wish you had a camera for: Jason then. The way he sat straight up. The way light flooded him and his eyes brimmed with wonder and laughter. The way joy returned after years of exile, sudden and quiet and fleet. The way his face, scowling ugly a moment before, a bitter old man’s face, turned youthful and hopeful. Jason was like a soldier standing in the soft glow of daybreak after a night of death raining down from the sky, astonished and thankful to be alive.

Yet I never changed one thing about Jason’s circumstances. I never altered a single detail of his life.

The only thing I changed was his mind.

That day, it was enough to change everything.

Often we get this backward. We won’t change our minds, won’t revise our attitudes, until someone—God, a parent, a boss, a spouse, a child, a coworker—changes our circumstances. We refuse to budge until someone moves a mountain. Our lives shuttle between an alteration of if only, what if, and as soon as: If only I had more money. As soon as I get a different job. What if my husband loved me more? If only my child wasn’t rebellious. . . . As soon as . . . What if . . .

But this is not how God works.

This is: “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind ”; “Be made new in the attitude of your minds” (Rom. 12:2; Eph. 4:23, emphasis mine).

Under God’s economy, nothing really changes until our minds do. Transformation is the fruit of a changed outlook. First our minds are renewed, and then we are transformed, and then everything is different, even if it stays the same.

God is more interested in changing your thinking than in changing your circumstances. He wants you to have the same attitude as and the very mind of Jesus Christ (see Phil. 2:5–8). To pull that off is a miracle larger than splitting oceans or tossing mountains into them. It is akin to raising the dead. Yet this is the daily occupation of the Spirit—leading us into all truth, reminding us of the things Christ taught, taking the things of Christ and making them known to us again. And this is the one area above all where we are urged to keep in step with the Spirit—to move in the direction he’s moving so that, seeing differently, we are free to live differently (see Gal. 5:22–25).

All this touches on the art of Sabbath-keeping. What makes Sabbath time—whether a day or a year, an afternoon or a week, a month or a moment—different from all other time? Simple: a shift in our thinking, an altering of our attitudes.

First we change our minds. Before we keep a Sabbath day, we cultivate a Sabbath heart.

A Sabbath heart sanctifies time. This is not a ritual. It’s a perspective. And it’s not a shift in circumstances—you still have the same job tomorrow, the same problems with your aging parents or wayward children, the same battle looming in the church. But you make a deliberate choice to shift point of view, to come at your circumstances from a fresh angle and with greater depth of field. You choose to see your life otherwise, through a different lens, from a different standpoint, with a different mind-set.

The root of the Hebrew word for “sanctify” means “to betroth.” It is to pledge marriage. It is to choose to commit yourself, all of yourself, to this man or this woman, and then to honor that commitment in season and out. Sanctifying time works the same way. You pledge to commit yourself, all of yourself, to this time, and then you honor that commitment whether it’s convenient or not.

The story of the first man and woman helps us understand this. When God sees and laments Adam’s aloneness and decides to make a woman for him, he doesn’t move directly from decision to action. He hesitates. He orchestrates an interruption. He assigns Adam a task—a huge, intricate, unwieldy task, a task that, although it’s narrated in a single line, may have taken days, weeks, or months to fulfill. God has Adam name all earth’s creatures: giraffes, squids, wombats, marmots, centipedes, woodpeckers, steelheads, the three-toed sloth, the Sasquatch. Just as God spoke all creation into being, now he has Adam speak identity into all creation. He has him give voice to the whole pageant of earth.

Before intimacy, taxonomy.

It seems an odd, even cruel, thing for God to make Adam do. It would be one thing if there were no helpmate on the way, and all God wanted was to provide him a creative diversion, to distract him from his haunting aloneness. But God already knows what he’s going to do. He’s going to bring the man a beautiful woman, utterly naked, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. Why not cut to the chase and do it now?

The naming, I think, is a testing.

And like all good tests, it’s designed to sharpen something in the man, to seal a resolve: that there is no other creature in all creation with whom he can forge a companionship rich enough to banish his aloneness. What about that golden retriever? He’s always glad to see you, no matter how late you come home or how boorish and neglectful you’ve been. He seems oblivious to your glaring inadequacies. Or what about the horse? He’s loyal and trusting, and he surrenders his power to your will, though your strength is paltry next to his. Or what about that cat?

Well, maybe that’s stretching things.

But it’s not the dog, and not the horse, and certainly not the cat who can solve the man’s plight.

Only the woman will do.

He must see her as the only one in all creation who can end the tyranny of his aloneness. Only she is close as his rib bone, close as his own breathing. For her alone should he leave mother and father.¹ With her alone can he be naked without shame.

That is the art of sanctifying. That is what it means to betroth another.

Just so with Sabbath time. Sabbath is time sanctified, time betrothed, time we perceive and receive and approach differently from all other time. Sabbath time is unlike every and any other time on the clock and the calendar. We are more intimate with it. We are more thankful for it. We are more protective of it and generous with it. We become more ourselves in the presence of Sabbath: more vulnerable, less afraid. More ready to confess, to be silent, to be small, to be valiant.

There is no day in all creation that can banish our aloneness, even while meeting us in it, like this day.

But first we change our minds.

One of the largest obstacles to true Sabbath-keeping is leisure. It is what cultural historian Witold Rybczynski calls “waiting for the weekend,” where we see work as only an extended interlude between our real lives. Leisure is what Sabbath becomes when we no longer know how to sanctify time. Leisure is Sabbath bereft of the sacred. It is a vacation—literally, a vacating, an evacuation. As Rybczynski sees it, leisure has become despotic in our age, enslaving us and exhausting us, demanding from us more than it gives.²

We all know how unsatisfying mere leisure can be. We’ve all known what it’s like to return to the classroom or the workplace after a time spent in revelry or retreat, in high jinks or hibernation: typically, we go back weary and depressed, like jailbirds caught. The time away from work wasn’t time sanctified so much as time stolen, time when we escaped for a short-lived escapade.

The difference between this and Sabbath couldn’t be sharper. Sanctifying some time adds richness to all time, just as an hour with the one you love brings light and levity to the hours that follow. To spend time with the object of your desire is to emerge, not sullen and peevish, but elated and refreshed. You come away filled, not depleted.

The Greeks understood. Embedded in their language, expressed in two distinct words for “time,” is an intuition about the possibility of sanctified time. Time, they knew, has two faces, two natures. It exists in two separate realms, really, as two disparate dimensions, and we orient ourselves primarily to one or the other. One is sacred time, the other profane.

The first word is chronos—familiar to us because it’s the root of many of our own words: chronology, chronicle, chronic. It is the time of clock and calendar, time as a gauntlet, time as a forced march. The word derives from one of the gods in the Greek pantheon. Chronos was a nasty minor deity, a glutton and a cannibal who gorged himself on his own children. He was always consuming, never consummated. Goya depicted him in his work Chronos Devouring His Children. In the painting, Chronos is gaunt and ravenous, wild-eyed with hunger. He crams a naked, bloody-stumped figure into his gaping mouth. Peter Paul Rubens depicted Chronos even more alarmingly: a father viciously biting into his son’s chest and tearing the flesh away, the boy arching backward in shock and pain.

Chronos is the presiding deity of the driven.

The second Greek word is kairos. This is time as gift, as opportunity, as season. It is time pregnant with purpose. In kairos time you ask, not “What time is it?” but “What is this time for ?” Kairos is the servant of holy purpose. “There is a time for everything,” Ecclesiastes says, “and a season for every activity under heaven.”

A time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot, . . .
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away, . . .
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace. (3:1–2, 5–8)

This year, this day, this hour, this moment—each is ripe for something: Play. Work. Sleep. Love. Worship. Listening. Each moment enfolds transcendence, lays hold of a significance beyond itself. Ecclesiastes sums it up this way: “I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end” (3:10–11).

Chronos betrays us, always. It devours the beauty it creates. But sometimes chronos betrays itself: it stirs in us a longing for Something Else—Something that the beauty of things in time evokes but cannot satisfy. Either we end up as the man in Ecclesiastes did: driven, driven, driven, racing hard against chronos, desperate to seize beauty but always grasping smoke, ashes, thorns. Seeking purpose and finding none, only emptiness.

Or we learn to follow the scent of eternity in our hearts. We begin to orient toward kairos. We start to sanctify some of our time. And an odd thing can happen then. Purpose, even unsought, can take shape out of the smallest, simplest things: “I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live. That everyone may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all his toil—this is the gift of God” (Eccl. 3:12–13).

This is a gift of God: to experience the sacred amidst the commonplace— to taste heaven in our daily bread, a new heaven and new earth in a mouthful of wine, joy in the ache of our muscles or the sweat of our brows.

There’s an exercise that some pilots go through late in their flight training. The student pilot gets the plane airborne, at cruising altitude. Then the instructor places a loose-fitting, thick-woven sack over the student’s head, so the student can see nothing. The instructor takes the controls and starts stunt-piloting: He loops the loop. He pushes the plane, Turkish-headache-style, skyward, then flips belly-up and swoops earthward. He rollicks and spirals, careens and nosedives, tailspins and wing-tilts. He gets the student utterly discombobulated. Then he puts the plane in a suicide dive, plucks the bag off the student’s head, and hands him the controls. His job: to get the plane back under control.

The exercise is called Recovering from an Unusual Attitude.³

To keep Sabbath, most of us first have to recover from an unusual attitude. We find ourselves disoriented, in vertigo. We’re dizzy with all our busyness and on a collision course.

Maybe it’s time to change your mind: to stop feeding Chronos his own children and start sanctifying time.