Week 6: Sabbath Mission - Day 36

In my last post I hinted at the heart of this experiment. When I invited you to join me in this experiment, it wasn't just about practicing sabbath through our re-dedication of time. It also had to do with reconnecting to the mission of the church. The church is who we are together and in the world. The church is what we do and how we live our Christ's mission in the world.

For our final days in this 40 day experiment, I will dive more directly into the connection of sabbath and mission. I will also create a survey, similar to the one many of you took before this blog began, as a way to share and assess our growth, understanding, discoveries, and reorientation(s).

This focus nicely fits the theme of this week of the new year. This is a time when many people create new year's resolutions, which is another way of reorienting oneself to a personal mission. So today, I invite you to begin creating your "new year's mission". You may do something similar to the list shared by Spirituality and Practice below, or use their list as a jumping off point for something different. You may wish to look over the past few weeks and use those themes as a place to start. Maybe this experiment has inspired you to make other changes that you'd like to implement? Today is your day to begin putting it into mission language. When you consider your "new year's resolutions" how do they fit with sabbath rhythms and Christ's mission in the world?

If you'd like to open up this conversation with your kids, there's a few ways you can get them thinking and talking. One quick idea: Use post its! Dedicate a wall or space in your house where they can add their hopes for a new year with pictures or words. Invite them to add something new every day for the entire week. This can be an easy family activity. Maybe you can have your own post-it color stack so it becomes really colorful. Set a family time at the end of the week where you read through all of them together. Group the similar hopes and ideas together. Talk about how these things are important for a good year. Talk about what's missing too. Pray together and put the post its in an envelope marked 2014. At the end of next year, take them out and read through them together again. Talk about the year together. Which hopes became a reality? Which changed? Set up a space to do it all again for 2015!