Picnics of Life

Life is no picnic, but without picnics life would not be so much fun. So this is our picnic week. Matt is home from college for Spring break, and we have big plans. We are taking the week off from homeschool (mostly) and if it doesn't rain, we plan to hit the slopes (the bunny slopes, and only the bunny slopes) to learn to snowboard mid-week. If there are no blog posts Wed. and Thursday morning, it is safe to assume that I am lying in a hospital bed somewhere with 3 broken arms and don't know my name.

If however, I emerge unscathed along with Matt and Asherel, it will be one of those picnic moments in life, those times when you purposefully put aside all the siren demands. I know how it goes with kids graduating from college... they get this harebrained idea that they are adults and able to leave their parents and strike out on their own. They are filled with high ideals of independence, and self sufficiency, armed only with our credit card....

Thus we are doing perhaps our last picnic with Matt, which is the main reason I hope we don't break or chip any important body parts snowboarding. Asherel recently asked, "Why did God rest on the 7th day? Do you think He was really tired?"

I know I would be, particularly after creating the duck billed platypus. He was obviously out of ideas for either mammals or birds, so he made a hodge-podge with the platypus. But the Hebrew word "kalah" used in the verse that tells us God completed his work, means He "fullfilled" a goal. It is the same concept as the word teleos, the Greek word used much later in the New Testament for Jesus' last utterance from the cross, "It is finished!" (It is completed, it is fullfilled.) So I don't think God was tired in either case. I think He had reached His goal, and there was nothing left to do for a little while. In the first case, He had created the universe, and in the second, He had made a way for a fallen universe to be covered in righteousness and make its way back to a Holy God. Even more interesting, the word "rested" used when God finished creating is the Hebrew word Shabath, and means to cease and celebrate! God was having a picnic in a sense, a celebration of His completed work.

Now my work is not completed in the same way at all.... but I do think that Matt is a fine creation which I had a small part in, and graduation from college is a fulfillment of sorts. So we are taking some time off, not a full fledged rest because the goals aren't reached yet, but just a picnic of sorts, a little moment of delight on the bunny slope.... and only the bunny slope.


Esther 9:17
...they rested and made it a day of feasting and joy.

Genesis 2:2-3
² By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. ³ And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.