“Trust more in God’s ability to speak to you than in your ability to hear from him,” my pastor said.
Little did I know that God would speak to me through a foreign language when I wasn’t able to hear him with my own.
Since the start of high school, I had been a serious student, and this carried over to the university. As I pursued my master’s degree, I was engaged with schoolwork seven days a week because engineering did not come easy to me. Of course, it wasn’t schoolwork every waking hour. I was involved in college ministry, I tutored, I played sports. But learning was important to me, and it took a lot of effort to understand things in my classes.
The commencement address for my bachelor’s degree from UC Davis was given by the Dean of the College of Engineering. He challenged the graduates to consider engineering education as a career. What he said struck me as an epiphany – it felt like that was my calling to become an engineering professor! The path to an academic career would, of course, require a Ph.D., and I applied myself to that task with the same seven-days-a-week effort.
As the time of my qualifying exams for the Ph.D. program at Stanford University approached, I remember feeling weary. The intensity I had brought to my undergraduate, master’s, and now Ph.D. study was catching up with me.
One Sunday afternoon, as I was driving, I was listening to a preacher on the radio. The broadcast was in Spanish, not my native language, but one in which I had developed some fluency. The passage was Exodus 20 and specifically the Ten Commandments.
The preacher pointed out we do a pretty good job obeying most of the commandments (like murder, stealing, etc.), but not with observing a Sabbath rest. Oh my! Do you know the feeling of conviction? I can still remember the exact place in the intersection where I was driving when those words convicted me!
The guidance from God’s word was blatantly clear: “You need to observe the Sabbath .”I struggled a bit on the way home with what to do next because I had qualifying exams coming for which I did not feel ready. How could I interrupt my ingrained pattern of always studying to take a day off?
The struggle did not last long, and I’m thankful that I listened to God and started that day to set aside my regular ‘work’ to rest. I can’t remember what I did that afternoon to rest, but in subsequent sabbath days I did things like writing letters to friends; I tried my hand at drawing and watercolors; I volunteered at a home for disabled children, and many other things that were restful to my soul. Remarkably, the schoolwork got done. I passed my qualifying exams, and the weariness I had felt from seven-days-a-week ‘work’ disappeared.
By and large, since that day, I have kept up the practice of setting aside my regular work for a day of rest. It has been transformational in my life, and I’m thankful for God’s kindness to remind me in a second language of His commandment to rest one day of the week.
BJ Furman
San Jose State University