My Bucket List...For Now

Hire a weekly maidservice

Go to Italy, France and Germany

Be published and sell copies internationally

Live to be a great=grandmother

Waltz again

Act in a Shakespearean play

Hear Keane in concert

Meet Sir Ken Robinson, Julia Cameron, Ray Bradbury, Jerry Lewis and Martha Stewart

Have my house finished, walls and floors

Get a masters degree in literature

Become debt free

Get my nails done

Work on a BBC film

Have a girl’s weekend with my best friends/daughters

Take Mom to the Shakespeare Fest in Ashland

Go to dinner and a movie complete with popcorn and soda

Visit the Hearst castle

Go to Solvang

See the Getty museum

Review (do anything that gets published) for Wall Street Journal

Pay for a vacation for my mother

Christmas shopping in San Francisco

Cruise the Caribbean

Wear a sequined dress, well

Have all my teeth fixed, while sedated

Drive through Ohio Amish country in late September

Sabbath: The Perfect Day

If seven is the perfect number, then the seventh day should be the perfect day.

That’s the point Dan B Allender is trying to make in his book Sabbath. Far from the dry scolding I expected, Allender’s nearly scandalous prose paints a picture of a day spent in the delight of the presence of the One who created us for wonder. Calling us from the busy, despairing grind of a workaholics anonymous existence, God’s purpose for the Sabbath was never to bore us, Allender insists.

Posing the idea that many of us prefer the predictability of sorrow to the serendipity of mysterious delight, the book may turn off the traditionalist who may insist, “Sundays were made to focus on God”, Allender reminds of Jesus’ words, “the Sabbath was made for man.”

At one point he even describes a Sabbath as more like hanging out in a French Bistro with the Savior than what most of us envision for the Lord’s Day. Ways to spend your Sabbath are suggested, and they vary from foot washing to smoking a stogie with a friend. Most center on food and time with people you care about.

This book should be read by every person who has ever spent a Sunday in drudgery, whether in church, or anywhere else. I won’t spend the seventh day of my week the same as I used to. This gentle voice has transformed my thinking!

I received a complimentary copy of this book from Thomas Nelson Publishers in return for my honest opinion of the book.