I have been reading Dan Allendar's excellent book, Sabbath. He writes of Belden Lane's book, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality. Lane tells the story of the French bringing a few desert Bedouin leaders to Paris to see the most glorious achievements of French culture. The Bedouin leaders saw the great French architecture, the Eiffel Tower but were seemingly unimpressed. But when they were taken to see a waterfall in the forest, they stood in complete amazement. They waited for the surging, spilling flow to stop.
Lane writes, "They refused to leave, adamantly declaring to their French guide that honor required waiting . . . waiting for the end. Knowing the water could not last much longer, they awaited the moment 'when God would grow weary of his madness,' when this wild extravagnaza would suddenly and finally exaust itself."
Allendar writes, "Nothing they had seen in their world paralleled the gushing flow of water that had run endlessly for thousands of years. We are the Bedouins who have learned to live in the desert of God's absence for thousands of years who cannot imagine the inexhaustable glory that has already been given to us in Jesus, that pours through now . . .and will pour forth with utter glory when he gloriously returns. The Sabbath gives us the opportunity to stand before the endless outpouring of the superabundance and fill up our thimble of faith with a drop of the bounty ahead."
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