Fasting: Spiritual Freedom Beyond Our Appetites
Rev. Monica McDowell Elvig
Fasting Reminds Us We Do Not Live By Bread Alone
The ancient spiritual practice of fasting is perhaps the most misunderstood of all the spiritual disciplines. Our culture’s contradictory obsessions with dieting and consumption lead to all the more confusion about the appropriate place for fasting in contemporary lives. Won’t it contribute to eating disorders? Doesn’t it denigrate the body and deny God’s good gifts of food and abundance? Questions like these are at the forefront of Lynne Baab’s mind in her newest book, Fasting...
Catherine Fransson
The Gift of Fasting for the Lenten Season
As Lent begins, now is a good time to explore what you’d like to learn during this year’s pilgrimage. Our tradition doesn’t require us to do anything. But the seasons of our lives offer special gifts only if we attune ourselves and offer our attention to God in a new way...
Sabbath Keeping: Finding Freedom in the Rhythms of Rest
Susan O’Loughlin Ward
A Gentle Antidote to Legalistic Lists
“Days
pass, years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles.” So
says a Jewish Sabbath prayer quoted by Lynne Baab...This prayer
describes our experience in the frenetic, materialistic, productivity-driven
milieu which is the twenty-first century West. We miss the incredible
treasures God has for us because we lack eyes to see and ears to
hear...
Sarah Sanderson
Reflections on Rest From
the Neonatal Care Unit
My daughter Abigail was born eight weeks
early and spent the first three weeks of her life in
the neonatal intensive care unit. During those weeks,
while sitting among plastic-walled incubators listening to the
loud alarms of babies’ heart monitors, I quieted my own
heart by reading Sabbath Keeping, a new book by my
former pastor Lynne Baab...
Rev.
Monica McDowell Elvig
Dine on This Sumptuous Feast
You are invited to
a rich feast, a celebration of abundance, and an opportunity
for rest and renewal—every
week! This is where Lynne Baab’s book on keeping the
sabbath begins... Drawing from deep wells of personal
experience and insights from a diversity of sabbath enthusiasts,
the author has compiled a fresh and refreshing look at this ancient
biblical ritual...
Jeanette Krantz
A Day of Rest from the Should's and
Ought's
As a pastor’s wife with grown
children I work as a nurse part time, serve on church committees,
am involved with people in small groups and participate in ministry
with my husband. I am pretty well set in routines, which, up until
I read Sabbath
Keeping, never led me to consider taking a full day each
week to stop all work and rest. And for heaven’s sake what
constitutes “rest”?
Beating Burnout in Congregations
Rich Erickson
Preventing Burnout and Its Ugly Consequences
Lynne
M. Baab, a Presbyterian minister in Seattle, and
one of my former students, has authored four books
already. It’s
a case of student leaving teacher in the dust!...Lynne Baab
deals with a disturbing irony: eager and active leaders
in local congregations all too often find themselves
exhausted and bitter in serving the church...
Brad Smith
Asking Some Tough Questions
...Congregations face a shrinking pool
of volunteers as fewer women are now at home, and even stay-at-home
moms have a schedule of sports and after-school lessons unheard
of a generation ago. Those who are available feel the pressure...
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