Thoughtful Moments

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 7, Issue 98, 11 August 1944, Page 2

Thoughtful Moments

(Supplied by the Whakatnne Ministers' Association).

A DAY DIFFERENT

What's, the good of a Sabbath day? This question was asked by the French people in the end of the. eighteenth century. France, had thrown off her old form of government, the king and his counsellors had gone, old laws and old customs hail vanished, until at last the reformers came to the day of rest, and they said it must go too. A rest every seventh day? Nonsense! A day to worship Cod every week? There was r.o Cod, they said; they had instead a Goddess of Reason, and she said that the Sabbath day was a mistake —it must go. 11' people wanted a rest, once in every ten days was enough. To begin with the French people thought this a line arrangement. Workmen "carried on" for nine -days instead of six. Working women did the same, and then, after a bit they all discovered that to work so long without "a day different," was beginning to sap their strength. They could not go on with their work. The seventh da\'. taken out of their wheel of life put all the rest of the machinery out of gear. So they clamoured, and got their Sabbath back. . . . Mankind needed the day of rest; they also needed God given back to them. Have we ever stopped to think what our lives would be like without this "day different"? . . . It's a day we could ill part with: a day, in fact, like a pivot upon which everything turns during the days of the week that follows. I like to think of it as the first day of the Aveek, and H have still the old-fashioned belief that "A Sabbath well spent, Brings a week of conten t.r Suppose we were like the French of the Revolution; that our men worked for nine days, that our children went to school for the same time, what a muddle we would get into! . . . Sunday morning is essentially the day for a fresh table-'doth and fresh towels. Sunday morning is the only time in the week we have breakfast together. How we would miss all these homely little things, and the quiet glow in our hearts when wc remember, "This is Sunday, we needn't hurry." lam speaking of the men and children, mind, when 1 speak of no hurrying, for to us women Sunday may 7 be a "day different, " and not a day of rest. But here's the difference between Sunday and Monday—on Monday everything is lost, everyone is cross, and everyone is in a hurry, but on Sunday there is a lovely 7 calm feeling in the air, and weary men and women feel their spirits soothed by the quiet of the Sabbath day.

There is another thing Sunday

OUR SUNDAY MESSAGE

docs for us and that is Ihe influence it lias upon our clothes. If \vc had no ,Sunday, we wouldn't bother about having a Sunday dress, and to change from her working garments into her Sunday ones. When only a woman knows what it means a woman ceascs to have a Sunday dress, tilings are looking pretty serious for her. She had better stop and ask herself what's to be the end of this. A Sunday dress means to her her own self respect, and that is a treasure to be guarded carefully. To get slovenly about it is the beginning of not. bothering about going to church. "I can't go to ohurch," she says; "I haven't a Sunday dress," and the habit grows with tragic rapidity. I used to watch with great interest a family who sat in front of us in church —a father and mother, two sons and one daughter. They were regularly in their places, decent, respectably dressed working folks. Then the older son ceased to come, and presently the mother ceased also. L did not know them, and as. they looked rather aloof people, I felt shy to speak first. Jou know how you always hope that the other pers&n will break the ice and speak first, and how that other person hopes you'll do it, and the ice gets firmer and firmer. One Saturday morning, however, I met the mother out doing her shopping, and taking courage for my comrade I asked was she well, as I had been missing her. Dear, dear! Why hadn't I spoken before? The poor woman was just dying for someone to speak to her. She was quite pleased (as we all are) to find we had been missing her, and then she confided to me the reason of their absence. The son, Tom, had taken his Sunday suit for weekdays, as his working clothes had grown very shabby. He was laying aside, every Saturday, as much as he could spare to buy himself a new suit, and then she added, with a pleasant little laugh "The boys want to give me a new coat, the same as the one \*ou wear on Sundays." Well, we.ll! How much we miss by not being friendly! How proud I was to tell her that my son Jack had sent me my Sunday coat out of his first earnings, and if you choose to think I'd change it for one of Queen Mary's, why, you're quite wrong! Then and there we had a talk about our sons, and we. parted like old friends, and promised to go and see each other. Sunday, "a day different"; Yes! "Oh day, most calm, most bright; The week were dull, but for thy light." —Isabel Cameron in "From a Cottage in Pennyco-ck Lane."