God<\/a> had completed the work he had been doing. He rested after all the work he had done.\u00a0 God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on that day he rested after all his work of creating.\u201d\u00a0 God deserved a break.\u00a0 I might be tired after a long week of farm work.\u00a0 That\u2019s nothing compared to creating Earth and the firmament.<\/p>\nThen God instructed in the Ten Commandments, \u201cRemember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Genesis goes on to say you shall not do any work, or your son, your daughter, your male servant, your female servant, your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates.<\/p>\n
Not a lot of us have livestock.\u00a0 Less of us have servants.\u00a0 But God\u2019s admonition remains.\u00a0 It\u2019s clear that the call to rest and worship is important.<\/p>\n
Ancient people carved out time in ways that could be measured.\u00a0 The Babylonians quartered the 28-day lunar cycle into weeks.\u00a0 The word \u201cshabbath\u201d is a Hebrew word for rest, and there it is at the beginning of our Judeo-Christian tradition.<\/p>\n
I have seen Sunday called the beginning of the week even though I more think of it as the end.\u00a0 The poet Henry Longfellow wrote, \u201cSunday is the golden clasp that binds together the volume of the week.\u201d\u00a0 It seems right to begin or end my week in church.\u00a0 The rest of the week revolves around it.\u00a0 It is one hour where the busyness is set aside, I am stilled, there is time to reflect.\u00a0 I might or might not pray well, but at least I will shut up.\u00a0 There\u2019s value in that.<\/p>\n
Church attendance has declined.\u00a0 Sunday is still a day off work for most.\u00a0 It does not include attending services for as many.\u00a0 I guess I will never know what that feels like.\u00a0 Sunday and church can\u2019t be separated in my 62-year old head.<\/p>\n
I mentioned that my dad tried to schedule field work away from Sundays.\u00a0 He would never cut hay on a Thursday that was likely be baled on Sunday.\u00a0 As the farm drifted from livestock to crops in my time, that has changed.\u00a0 Now, I look at a good weather day for planting and jump on the tractor as soon as I\u2019m home from Mass.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t talk to God about this as much as I used to.\u00a0 Too often rain has stopped things for two weeks at a time, and I feel compelled to be out there.\u00a0 Would God provide enough days me to finish, since he provides for the birds of the air who don\u2019t sow or reap?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know; maybe this is a sign of weak faith in me.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t just farmers back then who took a respite.\u00a0 Stores weren\u2019t open on Sundays for most of our nation\u2019s history.\u00a0 A couple weeks ago, in the Journal\u2019s page of fifty-year ago news, some stores in New Ulm made an organized effort to challenge the ordinance that prevented them from being open Sundays.\u00a0 The article mentioned that some suburban stores had begun staying open Sundays about a decade before.\u00a0 I assume that was referencing the Southdale Mall that opened in 1958.\u00a0 It reported that the downtown Minneapolis stores had not followed suit.<\/p>\n
I was too young to be paying attention then.\u00a0 But reading that it struck me that is a significant societal shift.<\/p>\n
Last year Minnesota allowed off-sale liquor stores to be open on Sundays.\u00a0 I like liquor as much as the next guy, but I didn\u2019t think we needed that.\u00a0 The small prohibition was a slight nod to our traditional roots.\u00a0 It was a tiny reminder that there is something different about a Sunday, that our lives are more than a steady stream of consumption.<\/p>\n
One thing Sunday has become is a sports day.\u00a0 For five months, pro football and Sundays have become linked.\u00a0 I hope it is not the case that football has replaced religion.\u00a0 But one has declined in practitioners as the other has risen; it is hard to not see such an implication.<\/p>\n
In the summer, Sundays give us amateur baseball, a source of joy for ball players and fans across Minnesota and certainly Brown County from Searles to Springfield.\u00a0 It is interesting to go back to the early 1900\u2019s when pasture ball and town ball games were played on Saturdays.\u00a0 With the coarse language, betting, and smoking that attended the games, it was considered an improper activity for the Lord\u2019s Day.<\/p>\n
Whether you are a churchgoer or not, I think we can all be glad for Sundays.\u00a0 Even if you are a marginal believer, it sets time apart from the patterns of the rest of the week.\u00a0 Sunday allows an opening for the sacred in our lives.\u00a0 Maybe we don\u2019t always take advantage, but it gives a space for our minds to lift to the beyond, whatever that may be.\u00a0 Thank God for Sundays.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[ad id=”11740″] When I was a kid on the farm, we had cows, pigs, and chickens.\u00a0 The animals didn\u2019t take days off.\u00a0 Neither did my dad and mom, Sylvester and Alyce.\u00a0 A wedding dance or graduation party was the nearest thing to a vacation we had.\u00a0 But there were Sundays. That meant church, but also …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[162],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weeds-by-randy-krzmarzick"],"aioseo_notices":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-22 16:15:46","action":"change-status","newStatus":"trash","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111078"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":111079,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111078\/revisions\/111079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}