“My work never ends these days.”

She was the third person, yesterday, to share the challenges of her schedule, and it wasn’t even lunch time.  My friend was glad to still be working. But her father in another state was struggling; she had just spent a few hours on the phone trying to arrange a follow-up visit with his oncologist.

If you are feeling overwhelmed these days with the tasks of life, you are not alone. Joining a group to work on anti-racism, spending six-eight hours a day in front of a computer, negotiating child care in a summer without camp, just figuring out cereal for dinner – our lives are full of intensity!

In a world that values us based on our earning power, in a time when even if you’re not working in a traditional sense, you could spend all day on Zoom, sabbath rest is more important than ever.

In some ways 2020 will give us a different 4th of July. We won’t travel as much; gatherings will be limited. In a time when our nation continues to come to terms with the deep flaws in the system we’ve inherited, I hope our celebration includes reflection and repentance.

“Liminal,” from the Latin limen, meaning door threshold, refers to transitional moments or spaces. You’ve left one place but you’re not yet in the next. Anthropologists describe liminality as the ambiguity and disorientation that happens in rites of passage, when a person is finished with one stage, separated from their old habits and ways, but not quite landed in the next.  Liminal times in our lives are both exciting and anxious, creative and exhausting.  (Think middle school.)

"…then, thenceforward, and forever free…”

They were the first words I heard waking up on this Juneteenth, Lincoln’s words ringing in my ears. Words it took the enslaved community in Galveston, Texas more than two years to hear. Words Lincoln should never have had to say in the first place.

155 years later, we’re still trying to get that “thenceforward, and forever” part right.