A few Lents back, we invited some friends to feast following Sunday morning worship. The meal went well and I do believe everyone had a wonderful time but something unusual occurred during dessert. We had found a delightful chocolate concoction and offered it around. Several demurred saying that they had given up chocolate for Lent. Painful as it clearly was for them, they were sticking to the rigors of their spiritual discipline. I thought I detected tears in the eyes of one of them. Still, I was not deterred from my own selfish pleasure and with what can only be described as a devilish attitude, I enjoyed my dessert, taking great pains to carefully wipe the dripping chocolate off of my chin.

After I thoroughly acted the cad, I quietly informed them of a little known but highly relevant religious fact...the Sundays that occur during the season of Lent are not actually part of Lent itself. That is, the forty days of Lent, when many practicing Christians are called to enter into a new level of spiritual devotion and discipline, do not include Sundays. In religious parlance we say, "Sundays are in Lent but not of Lent."

Somberly, I showed them a calendar and counted out for them the days from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday. There were precisely forty...not counting Sundays. "Therefore," I explained with sober sincerity, "any disciplines taken up for Lent could be broken on Sundays without one's piety being disparaged at all."

After I was pushed aside and nearly trampled by my friends' frenzied race to the dessert tray, I explained the reason for such reasoning. Unlike other aspects of the church year, the observance of the Sabbath remains fixed. Every Sunday of every season of every year is always set aside as a time for celebration. It makes no never mind whether the Sunday falls on Christmas Day or the Fourth of July. It is always, without exception, a little Easter, a day for rejoicing.

All of this religious regaling to make the following non-religious point: We all can benefit greatly from fixed rhythms in our lives.

Back to my religious roots..."For everything there is a season," the Bible says, "and a time for every purpose under heaven." It makes enormous sense to me, and I would assume to millions of others, that we set aside certain times of the day and week to celebrate who we are and what we are about.

I have harped, perhaps too often and too loudly, over this contentious issue but I remain adamantly convinced that we all need time for reflection, time for quietly treasuring the gifts we experience in our lives.

What we are witnessing more and more is a frenetic pace in our daily life that has us racing hither and yon without any thought as to its benefit or blessing. Too many of us are so busy taking our kids to sports events or ourselves to business appointments that we never stop to ask why or what for.

I have always thought of dinner as a kind of Sabbath in the course of a day, a holy time for reflecting on the day's events with those who matter the most.

Such sacred contemplation can be very difficult in the drive-in line at McDonald's.

Of the few really valuable things I can share with the couples that come to me to be married, I always emphasize the importance of finding time every week for Sabbath. It certainly doesn't have to happen in a church or synagogue but those places can provide a time apart, a time radically different than the rest of the week that can help put the rest of the week into perspective.