Daily Dose 23: Executive Oversight 2: The Time

Did you know that during the French Revolution the social reformers did away with Sunday and the week as we know it? They tried to implement a 10 day week with no Sundays or Christian holidays. We think we live in a deeply secularized society, but very few social designs have been as stridently secularist as the French Revolution.

The Daily and Weekly Creation Pattern

Of course, that agenda failed, perhaps because the six-day-work, one-day-rest pattern is not just an arbitrary religious tradition, but part of the very grain of creation itself. The Lord rested on the seventh day, not because He was worn to a frazzle and could not do another thing. He rested to survey His “work product” of the creation week and to “assess” it, if we want to put it into modern work jargon.

The Purpose of the Day

He set the precedent for the day He designed for human benefit (Mark 2: 27), a day He said would be of greatest benefit when no one did their daily work: not the fathers, their laborers, their children, or even any living work animals (Exodus 23: 12).

The Pleasure of the Day

Much later, Isaiah further enhanced the understanding of the day:  “keeping the day” meant delighting in it, even to the point of setting aside personal pleasures and even idle talk on the day, as well as work. The benefit for these self-denials was a life full of joy (Isaiah 58: 13-14).

The Person of the Day

Taken in this light, “rest” does not mean a day for personal relaxation, entertainment, or even sleep. It means intentionally altering our primary focus on that day to Someone else.

The Problem of the Day

The Lord’s Day is one of the most valuable time cycles (the time cycle discussion is coming in a few days), handing us time for unhindered thinking about the Lord, time to step back from the swirl of activity and be still. Yet, in a quest to avoid “legalistic” charges, Christians seem to have squandered the powerful potential for the day, too often chaffing that we have to spend several hours in church on “our only day off” and rushing home from church to football, work, homework, shopping.  We’ve lost sight that the day is a stewardship gift intended to align us on a weekly basis with the wholesome, productive balance God intended for people whose job is stewarding His time.

In this light,  the modern five day work week was a bonus schedule: five of the six biblical work days  our quality work product is (most often) dedicated to an employer, the sixth day is a bonus work day, where our quality time can be focused on “working” for ourselves, running our lives away from the work place. The capstone day, the Lord’s Day, is the day where our quality time is (supposed to be) dedicated to the Lord.

A Part of the Day

Many years ago, the Lord gave me the idea to attend a weekly executive meeting time with myself and Him, sometime between Saturday evening and Sunday evening. The meeting became a vital element of my practical, personal worship of the Lord, the owner of all the time I have to steward for Him. The meeting also happens on the day I am “not working,”  so I could be the executive, overseeing the big picture of what could be done over longer periods of time: a month, a semester, a year, a lifetime. To keep it official, I called it my Executive Home Oversight time (EHO), but Executive Oversight, or as one friend calls her time, a “little meeting with myself” works just as well. It’s not what its called, but what happens in it that has made the time so special.