Sunday

As long as I can remember Sunday has been a special day.  Where I lived and grew up, it was the Lord's Day.  My Father was an avid fisherman.  Before he became a professing Christian, he often told me, "You don't fish on Sunday.  Give the fish a day of rest."  After his death when I was seven, my Mother moved back to Waycross, Georgia so my sister and I could be reared among family.  As I grew up there, going to church on Sunday was always a part of our life.  Sunday morning and Sunday evening, we went to church where I learned about Jesus and sang the great hymns of our faith.  Five years after we moved back home, my Mother married a Methodist preacher who, of course, kept the Sunday tradition very much alive.  His deep influence on my life is obvious enough as I walked in his footsteps as well as the footsteps of his Father to the altar of ordination.

 

I have been fortunate and blessed to have adults in my life who kept saying to me that Sunday was a special day, a holy day, the Lord's Day.  Back in those years what we know as Blue Laws kept most businesses closed on Sunday which further underscored the special nature of the day.  In those days folks bought ahead what might be needed on Sunday and those who wanted to do so attended church services.  Not even Blue Laws made everyone attend worship.  While in Waycross, Sunday became a day for worship and going out in the country to visit uncles and aunts and cousins and the cemetery.  Later after I became a Preacher's Kid (PK), Sunday was even more filled with the stuff of church life.

 

While I had my "going to do things my own way" when I went to college, the not doing church stuff on Sunday soon became a part of my past.  I could never completely throw away the influence of those who told me again and again that Sunday was the Lord's Day which made it different and my life within it different, too.  As I look around and see a society doing it differently and see how it is not working so well, I can only wish that the influence which guided my life could so direct those growing up today.