2016 Belmont University Lenten GuideSample

God gives the Israelites a peculiar command in the 25th chapter of Leviticus. He tells them to give the land a Sabbath year, a year where there shall be no sowing, no reaping, no harvesting at all. The land is to lay low, lay bare and be free from the pressure to produce anything. It sounds preposterous, or risky at the very least. Where would their food come from if not from the ground? If not from their own hands? God knows the risk this long rest would render and he asks them anyway. It’s a simple lesson in faith with large implications. Will God come through? Will He provide? Or will we starve? The Israelites sit back, I imagine with some fear, and hope for His best.

I am struck by the Sabbath year because I’m continually tempted to force growth in places I’m not sure it was ever meant to be. I pump energy and time and resources into places where I know God has told me to simply let it rest. I want progress and I want it now and I don’t want to wait. For a maximizer like me with a streak (or two) of impatience, a Sabbath year sounds like a waste of my can-do energy and a risk I’m not willing to bear. I know that food requires sowing and reaping, work and time. That is something I can count on. That is something I know to be true.

But I have a feeling that God is asking me to believe in better things, to find truth beyond my own self-determination. I want instead to believe in God’s economy, the one of abundance, the one that assures me that scarcity is merely a myth. I want to believe that rest can be productive, that my own humanity has limits that leave me needy of receiving the grace of God. Sometimes grace looks like an abundance of food in the Sabbath year and sometimes it looks like something else entirely. But it is always a gift from above, always straight from the hand of a loving Father. Thanks be to God.

KELSEY KING
Alumna