The final thing I’ll mention that has become clear to me over two years of blogging is that I don’t like to write about myself. I’m not one of those bloggers who likes to tell what I’m doing, thinking, and planning. I only talk about my family or my job in very general terms. I really enjoy reading James Lileks, but I just can’t write like that. He writes about his trips to the shopping store, his visit to the coffee shop, his time with his daughter, and what TV shows and movies he watched. I know more about James Lileks than I do about some people I consider to be good friends.

Sometimes I force myself to write something about myself. These last few days for example. But don’t be too concerned. I’ll soon get back to normal posts that look at more interesting things than me.

Another thing that has become clear to me in the last couple years of blogging: I am not originally creative. Instead, I would call myself synthetically creative. Rather than making up something from whole cloth, in writing I prefer to take things from two or more sources and join them in a (hopefully) new way. That’s why I enjoy taking a news article and joining it with a quote from a book or movie. Neither is original, but I’ve brought them together in a unique way.

I’ve often heard the phrase that everyone has a book in them. This is said as an encouragement for people to write. As I’ve realized my strength in synthetic creativity, I’ve come to the conclusion that if I do have a book in me, it most likely isn’t a novel. It probably is a plagiaristic cobbling of two other books. Maybe I could write Oliver Copperfield….

I’ve been blogging for a couple years now. Lately I haven’t been writing a post every day on the mj site as I’ve been focusing on the meditatio site, but I’ve have been writing every day. Over the course of the last two years, some things have become clear to me.

The first thing is that I’m not a writer. I enjoy blogging, but writing isn’t in my blood. I don’t live to write, but rather I write to communicate. I don’t write in clever flourishes, but instead try to write simply and clearly. I often think that I could write better transitions, so my style is pretty choppy. My goal in writing is not to say something in an impressive way, but rather to say it in an understandable way.

But given the amount of time I have to write and the amount of wordsmithing I can do, I’m generally pleased with the results. It could be a lot better, but given that I’m not a writer, it could be a lot worse.

(Ok, so it isn’t really breaking news. You already knew this.)

Q.60. How do we keep the Sabbath holy?

A. We keep the Sabbath holy by resting the whole day from worldly affairs or recreations, even ones that are lawful on other days. Except for necessary works or acts of mercy we should spend all our time publicly and privately worshiping God.

The catechism has covered how the Sabbath principle is based on God’s creation, and is part of the moral law. Thus it is still in effect today. We have seen that the day of the observance was moved from Saturday to Sunday after the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Now we come to the question of how we are to observe the Sabbath.

Personally, I find this to be a very difficult question. Part of the difficulty is that the answer runs so counter to our modern culture. In my own lifetime, Sunday’s have changed dramatically. When I was young, it was difficult to find a store that was open on Sunday. Now, it is difficult to find a store that closes for Sundays. The world now treats Sunday as a day like any other day of the week. Even children’s sporting events are now regularly scheduled for Sunday mornings. It did not use to be like that.

Within Christian circles, Sunday is generally not treated any different than other days of the week. Most Christians accept that you go to church Sunday morning, but now many churches are scheduling Saturday evening services, and I have even seen some churches offer Friday and Thursday evening services for people who want to free up their Sunday morning for other purposes.

The concept of keeping the Sabbath holy is almost gone from our modern culture, and so when you try to observe the Sabbath, you are swimming upstream.

But what also makes this difficult is the desire to not be legalistic and pharasetical. In observing the Sabbath, it is possible to be so hung up on making rules of what is allowed and what is not allowed that you suck all the joy out of the day. The Sabbath is God’s gift to us, and it is not to be a burden. It is not a day to focus on what you can’t do, and pine for all the things you miss doing. Rather, it is to be a day of rest and worship.

I have found that trying to balance this is difficult. As a family, we try to avoid commerce on Sunday. We don’t go shopping or eat out at a restaurant if at all possible. When I was in college, I didn’t do school work on Sunday. I sometimes get pulled into things that I have to do for work on Sunday because of hardware upgrades or other things that must occur on the weekend, but otherwise, I do not do any business work on Sundays. We generally don’t watch TV or movies on Sunday, although we will sometimes turn on a major sporting event in the evening.

I don’t know that I’m perfectly observing the Sabbath. I suspect that I am not. It seems strange that this is so difficult an issue. But it is one of the ten commandments, and as such, we need to be concerned with how we should keep the Sabbath holy.

Amos 8:4-6

⁴ Hear this, you who trample on the needy
and bring the poor of the land to an end,
⁵ saying, “When will the new moon be over,
that we may sell grain?
And the Sabbath,
that we may offer wheat for sale,
that we may make the ephah small and the shekel great
and deal deceitfully with false balances,
⁶ that we may buy the poor for silver
and the needy for a pair of sandals
and sell the chaff of the wheat?”

This morning I awoke from a dream with the following sentences in my mind. In my dream, this referred to the computer advances of the 1960′s.

They were always besting their best, and then they went back and bested it again. That was when they invented nested loops.

I always like when you awake with a profound thought. If you can only hold on to it long enough until you are fully awake, you realize how silly it really is.

We watched the movie Luther last night, and we were amazed to find that Martin Luther is the brother of Lord Voldemort.

We knew things were going to heat up when President Bush refused to take the advice of Al Gore and Osama bin Laden and sign the Koyto Global Warming Treaty. Now the entire solar system must pay the price Bush’s rash act?

Headline Earthfiles: Is the Sun Heating Up?

November 18, 2005 Cambridge, Massachusetts – Astrophysicists are scratching their heads about what’s happening on the sun and in our solar system. Why has this so-called “Solar Minimum” been so active? It should be quiet now with very few sunspots because this is supposed to be the low point of the Sun’s 11-year-sunspot cycle. But this week, there was a sunspot called 822 that’s 87,000 miles across – the size of the planet Jupiter! Could it erupt with more powerful X-flares as has happened the past few months. Big flares threaten all the broadcast, global positioning and military satellites that now orbit our planet. As I’ve reported before in Earthfiles, the sun is not “normal.” Is it warming up? Earth’s North Pole and Mars’s South Pole are melting at a surprisingly rapid rate. Even far out Pluto seems to show some melting.

How many more ice caps on other planets have to melt before the US will finally agree to cripple it’s economy?

[Gore and bin Laden links from Opinion Journal. Earthfiles link from Digg.]

Q.59. Which day of the week has God designated as the Sabbath?

A. From the beginning of the world until the resurrection of Christ God established the seventh day of the week as the Sabbath. From that time until the end of the world the first day of the week is the Christian Sabbath.

The concept of celebrating the Sabbath on Saturday is so firmly established, there must have been something dramatic to change the celebration to Sunday. That dramatic event was the resurrection of Christ. Actually, the fact that the day of worship changed from Saturday to Sunday is one of the proofs of the resurrection.

Acts 20:7

On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread [share the Lord's Supper also called communion], Paul talked with them, intending to depart on the next day, and he prolonged his speech until midnight.

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Revelation 1:9-11

⁹ I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. ¹⁰ I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet ¹¹ saying, “Write what you see in a book and send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus and to Smyrna and to Pergamum and to Thyatira and to Sardis and to Philadelphia and to Laodicea.”

This is the Grove City College chapel steeple on a beautiful fall day.

The Tree of Knowledge is carved above an entrance to Crawford Hall on the campus of Grove City College, PA.