Fourth Word - an Intro - Exodus 20:8-11

20:8-11 – The fourth word or “commandment” is “remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.” Interestingly, TB’s almost entire lecture about this one is about which day of the week we are actually supposed to consider as the Sabbath. He notes that the Sabbath was always observed by Israel on Saturday because it was the 7th day of the week and it wasn’t until Constantine who changed it to be different than the Jews and to keep the kingdom of Rome more profitable, he arranged for God’s holy day to be aligned with the popular worship of the sun god on Sunday (apparently that’s where the name came from.” I personally don’t think that the observance of the Sabbath being on Sunday as opposed to Saturday matters that much. I’m not saying that church members should get to pick whatever day they want the sabbath to be on and then do that, I’m just saying, if the church sets Sunday to be God’s holy day, then I think that God will use that as the same obedience He did for Isreal.

There is a lot written about this in the IM and TB has a lot to say but honestly, I’m too burned out emotionally do really do the Sabbath commandment adequate justice today so I think I’m just going to do my own personal spiel on it for today, then come back tomorrow. The Sabbath has been an interesting evolution for me. As a kid, I thought that keeping the sabbath day holy meant not spending any money and going to church. I thought that anyone who worked on Sunday was bad. When talking about this with my ex-husband when we were married, he said “but what if they want to work” or basically, what if they need the money so badly that taking a day off work would financially ruin them. That was an interesting idea. I also wondered, if people aren’t supposed to work but what about taking care of sick people at the hospital? Or police or fire department. So I changed my stance to “only working necessary jobs” but like working retail on Sunday was bad.

Working in medicine myself, I’ve found that I’ve worked most Sundays for my whole adult life, but I’ve usually been able to go to church. Now that I’m still working every single Sunday, I will go to the 9am ward’s sacrament meeting, take the sacrament and then leave to go home and sleep. Is that enough? Probably not. I really dislike Relief Society, so I try to avoid it. They cry too much, it’s exhausting. I don’t know, maybe it’s a Utah thing, I just don’t relate to these people, we’ve lived different lives and listening to their version of visiting teaching, I’m just not interested. Maybe that’s my issue. Maybe I need to make more of an effort. But that’s my struggle. I did go to a mid-singles ward once and that was fun, so maybe when I get back to a regular schedule I’ll try to go there more.

Anyway, I have definitely struggled lately with not being like “oh I’ll just stop and get food on the way to work” on Sunday. Again, that goes back to what exactly keeping the sabbath day holy means. Maybe I need to think about that more too.