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If anyone ever tells you that Jim Angehr isn’t more fun than a barrel of monkeys, just click through to the first installment of this two-part blog post!

Alas, for those of you that have read last week’s dispatch, it wasn’t a knee slapper. In my previous entry, I observed that as a result of a variety of factors, we find ourselves living in an age of “ambient trauma”; we’re constantly so barraged with a succession of fear-inducing headlines (whether genuinely so or ginned up) that our default disposition over time becomes trauma-tinged. Just living feels like it hurts more than it used to.

We’re fragile people, at most only one news cycle away from falling into patterns of anxiety, agitation, and angst. Help!

Let me direct you to what our sabbatical-tossed Executive Pastor, Eric Mitchell, considers to be the most frequently preached or taught passage of Scripture in the history of Liberti Collingswood—Psalm 1. (Fun fact: in addition to Sunday morning sermons, Psalm 1 functioned as the keystone text for multiple men’s retreats in the early days of our church.) (Fun fact #2: one of the high points of my tenure at Liberti is that I designated the first few men’s retreats here to be David Hasselhoff-themed, as the throwback graphic above attests.) (Fun fact #3: the amusement level I garnered from the concept of Hoff-treats far outstripped anyone else’s enjoyment of the same.)

The point being, Psalm 1. I love how this poem likens a resilient follower of God to a “a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither” (v. 3). What an image. On the farm in which my father grew up and lives today, there’s an oak at the top of a nearby hill that’s visible from the house, and even from a hundred yards away, it appears massive. As I’ve visited my folks at various points in the annual calendar, it’s a joy to witness that tree as it transitions through different seasons. Through frigid winters and scorching summers, blustery falls and water springs, the oak abides.

Here’s my intuition concerning how we can navigate through being buffeted by ambient trauma yet without capsizing, and it constitutes a triangulation between fasting, feasting, and sabbath-keeping. (It’s no coincidence that these items are included within the “Practices of Presence” that we’ve been pressing into as a church family this ministry year.)

One of the ways in which our experience is flattened by a hyperactive news cycle and overweening technological bombardment is that we lose a sense of the longitudinal nature of time. Everything is now, including that especially when we’re triggered, our past becomes a new present and the future seems remote and hopeless.

Do you know what lengthens our perception of the unfolding succession of days? Fasting and feasting. When we fast from goods that we enjoy for the sake of waiting upon the Lord, we mark time in a more intentional manner as we look ahead to whatever feast is to come. Likewise, if we engage in healthy patterns of labor and sabbath, our perception of time begins to be re-differentiated. As I work hard and then rest well, consequently, I’m better able to pour myself into each of these modes while judging neither of them to be either ultimate or fruitless.

Easier said than done, I know, but now think about how maintaining a proper contrast between past, present, and future would modulate how we receive negative news. On one hand, for whatever past is dredged up by the present, the former doesn’t catasphrophize the latter. On the other, no matter how challenging the present may seem, we’ll recognize that it won’t last forever.

Then there’s the whole thing about the gospel. Jesus crucified and resurrected, by which the Lord through his Spirit engages our pain with hope and healing while also assuring us that there lies ahead of us a new heavens and new earth in which every tear will be wiped away. If there truly remains ahead a sabbath rest for the people of God, then surely our present can be helpfully relativized in our own estimations.

Still, please don’t misunderstand me. These are difficult days to navigate. But let’s chew on fasting, feasting, and sabbath and see if God doesn’t help us better to persevere through them.

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