Shmita

I turned 25 at the beginning of this week.

And I am full of hope.

Life has been kind to me in the past year, and for the most part has gifted me with a tremendous time of peace.

Peace is something I cannot remember having before, not like this.

The timeline of my life used to be determined by drama, by crises.  Time did not pass in minutes for me, it passed by events: divorces, remarriages, confrontations, and the like.

It started eleven years ago, on the week of my 14th birthday.  My parents' marital problems came bursting into the light and by October of that year, their marriage was done.  For the following ten years, it was events like that that marked my time; it was frantic living, fearful, frenetic, living from intensity to intensity.

But somewhere in the past year, peace stole in on slippered feet and started sleeping on my couch. 

I have just recently stopped tensing for the next blow.

But peace makes me anxious, because who I am if I am not fixing or saving something or someone?  Is God angry at me for not being as "spiritually productive" or "theologically confident" as I used to be?  Shouldn't I always be a whirlwind of strength and salvation?

Unrest, I can handle.  Strife and Fear and Sadness I know how to house and bear.

But Peace?

"I just wish I knew why this was a fallow time," I journaled.

For the ancient Hebrews, every 7th year was שמיטה , shmita, the Sabbath year.  The word literally translates to 'release'.  The Torah forbids agricultural work and the land is left fallow and untended, intentionally untouched.  Leaving the land unfarmed for a year gives it a necessary rest to replenish the nutrients needed for a good crop.  One year of rest becomes six years of bounty.

The land must rest in the seventh year.  And even God rested on the seventh day.

After ten hard years, I was depleted.  Spent and maimed, I had little to give to yield a harvest.

So peace came in and shut the doors. 

I now understand why this is a fallow time.

I am healing and growing stronger in the peace.  And once I am replenished, my life and work will yield a bounty that only the grace of a shmita could give.

I am full of hope because I look down and see the wounds are now white scars, my legs are strong, my eyes are bright.

Because of grace, I am replenished.

Because of grace, I am full of hope for the harvest I soon will yield.

I am 25 and full of hope.