Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Angie Merrick said…
You are a writer and your words are beautiful, slippered feet and all. :)

The best part, I think, is that you spent very little time on the crises and most of it in the fallow part.

Also I always feel a little more full when I read a friend's blog and there's a new experience (the shmita, in this case). I like it when someone has done their research; feels like sitting down to thick, chunky creamy and crispy homemade guacamole instead of the crap jarred kind. Nice image, huh. ;-)

I needed someone else to do the prep work today. Thanks.

Popular posts from this blog

The Core Four

What a wonderful delight - the Core Four are back and typing about their lives. Nothing makes my day quite like reading a fresh entry - or two even! - from Tricia AND Traci AND Jans. Nothing compares. Especially Jans; that was what, a two, maybe three month difference between entries? It made me sad, but I checked as often as I thought of it. What a tremendous treat to click your link and find my name invoked in the first sentence - I'll be on a high from that for hours to come. To the rest of you wondering what names I'm referring to, check on my links sidebar; the three of them and I used to live in three different cities and two different states (now three cities and three states), and our little-traveled blogs kept us connected. These girls are the reason why I started writing a blog at all; it's hard to imagine that I once was the worst at updating consistently...now I can't get enough of it, and I run out of stories to tell (which is saying alot for me...) We all ...

The First Stages

2 days ago I had a coffee date with the girl "in charge" of the house I'll be moving into this Sunday. Snuggled down in a sweatshirt over a white chocolate mocha during a drizzly afternoon we went over last minute details to make sure she and I were on the same page. As we wrapped everything up, she told me to wait and dashed to the car; coming back in with a polka dot gift bag I had only eyes for what lay behind the curled red ribbon tying the two handles together: two shiny silver keys. Inside the bag was a beautiful red journal and a heap of candy from all the girls to welcome me into the house, but I couldn't get over the feel of those keys in my hand with fresh cut grooves. I marveled at the sight of them threaded onto my keychain as Sarah Brasse's eyes danced from across the table. I looked up, feeling the warmth of the mocha spread from my abdomen to my fingers and toes and the ends of my hair. "It's real, isn't it?" I said. "It's...

We Dying Immortals

A few months ago, my boss took everyone in the office out for drinks to celebrate a new big client that one of the lawyers had just signed on.  We cheerfully paraded out of the office at 4:30, ready to drink to the occasion.  The evening sun sparkled through the tall bar windows on my glass of rum and coke as we swathed ourselves in a haze of laughter at the corner of the bar.  A few stools down the other legal receptionist, a middle-aged Southern blonde, politely declined the appetizers because her husband was already at home cooking dinner for her.  One of the lawyers joked that her husband was trying to get her in the mood; she replied with a smile and quickness, "He doesn't have to work that hard to get me in the mood."  We all laughed. That laughter has gone. At the beginning of October, she called off work one Thursday.  She had taken her husband to the hospital the previous night with severe abdominal pain, and the doctors couldn't identify the cause.  After se...