My husband and I are Sabbath keepers. The fourth Commandment is the only one of the ten that makes people uncomfortable. It makes some people downright angry. Seriously, there are people who’ve gotten abusive over me saying that I observe the Sabbath every week. From sundown Friday until sundown on Saturday my time is God’s. We read scripture, we have fellowship with friends. We watch Gospel movies. We take walks with our dog. We nap because we work the other six days of the week and we’re tired. God made me. He knows what I need. He knows I need to rest and recharge so I can keep going in this crazy, screwed up world. The Sabbath is a day of rest and my husband and I are both grateful for it and wish we’d known about it years ago. The Ten Commandments were written on stone, in God’s own hand. They are not the Mosaic Law, which was “a witness against us”, written on paper by the hand of Moses. The Ten Commandments wasn’t nailed to the cross. We were all created with free will, and it’s by our free will that we choose to observe the Sabbath.
We started attending a church together several years ago. We found friends there, people with common values and strength of faith. We often saw each other during the week to break bread together and share our joys and our burdens. My husband and I were very active in the church, volunteering lots of time and energy. I was an adult Sabbath school teacher and he told the Children’s Story during service. There were three different people who gave the sermons on alternating weeks; one pastor and two lay people. About a year and a half ago we came to a crossroads there and decided to leave the church. We remained very close with many of the members, including one of the people who delivered the messages there. Recently he also decided not to participate in this particular congregation any longer. For the past two weeks we’ve been meeting at our home on the Sabbath for a few hours of fellowship and study. We’ve really missed sharing time with fellow believers on our day of rest.
We have lots of friends in our tight-knit little neighborhood, in fact almost everyone we work with lives in our community. We’ve always talked about our faith with the people in our daily lives, and lots of them have belonged to one church or another at some point in their lives and the thing they all seem to have in common is that they don’t go anymore. They’ve been put off by the hypocrisy they’ve encountered, by people talking the talk but not walking the walk. They don’t want to go back to a church. But that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped believing in God. That doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t love to have people to pray with when they’re going through a tough time. Or that they don’t want to have somewhere to go if they need anointing for healing or counsel when they’re facing challenges. Our neighbors feel at home at our place. They drop in a lot. In fact we have an open door policy here – most people don’t knock, they just walk in. If the door is locked, they can still walk in because most of them have keys. And now on Sabbath they can “Drop in Church”. They can come by, talk, pray together with us, read some scripture or talk about the Word, have a snack or a cup of coffee. They might stay a few minutes or a few hours.
My husband and I always said that our first church is our home. And it is.
Tracy Petry 