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Holy Spirit disruptions: Detachment with love

Lynne Baab • Saturday September 11 2021

A few years ago a friend started attending Alanon. She taught me a phrase she learned there: “detachment with love.” In Alanon, the phrase is used to describe a stance that supports family members and friends who suffer from addiction, without enabling or rescuing. For me, those words unlocked a door I had been trying to get through for years, not so much with addicts but with people I find challenging. I had seen the kind of detachment that hurts: family members completely rejecting other family members, friends who completely turn away from friends. I had seen the kind of love...

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Spiritual diary of sheltering in place: the lifeline of God’s voice through the Bible

Lynne Baab • Thursday April 30 2020

God spoke to me very clearly through scripture last week, and that wonderful (and challenging) moment got me thinking about how and when God has spoken to me very clearly and specifically through a passage in the Bible. The kind of directness and clarity I experienced last week has happened before – many times before – and I wish I could quantify it. An average of weekly? No, probably not that often, although at least weekly something from the Bible is helpful and relevant, and of course that is a form of God speaking to me.

I’m thinking of those direct and...

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Contrasts: Engaging in spiritual practices because of grace or guilt

Lynne Baab • Thursday June 14 2018

I’ve been speaking and writing about the Sabbath for more than a decade, but I recently had an aha experience about Sabbath keeping in my life and its connection to other spiritual practices.

Much of my speaking and writing about spiritual practices flows out of my own Sabbath observance. The Sabbath taught me how spiritual practices work: we know God loves us, so we set up structures in our lives to draw near to this God of abundant blessings.

When we were young adults, my husband and I lived in Israel for 18 months. Our apartment was in a Jewish neighborhood in Tel Aviv, so...

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Stories I ponder: We are necessary and superfluous

Lynne Baab • Thursday September 28 2017

More than 30 years ago, my husband and I lived in Israel for 18 months, experienced the Sabbath day, loved it, and adopted a Sabbath pattern when we returned to the US. We did this entirely on our own. In the early and mid 1980s we didn’t know of any other Christians who were interested in the Sabbath except as a quirk of Jewish culture.

In the late 1980s and then into the 1990s, Christians began writing about the Sabbath. Both Marva Dawn and Eugene Peterson were influential. After our years of observing a Sabbath with no support from others, Dave and...

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