Written by Emma Weber
Barista’s Favorite, no cinnamon, with oat milk is my friend Bob’s regular order. He pairs it nicely with a number two on sourdough. The other day I found out he likes birds, so I asked him if he had seen the birdhouses around campus. He smiled and informed me that he had built them.
Last semester I was walking with a professor discussing our frequent conversation topics: mole mating rituals, bugs and patterns of birds. We passed the front of the heritage building, and he pointed out a numbered birdhouse. He told me that someone had built bluebird houses around campus, numbered them and made sure there was no map to find them. From then on I searched for the treasured numbered houses.
On Sunday I found a birdhouse on a walk with a friend, reminding me of my mission. Since this is the most exciting thing to happen to me in a while, I’ve been talking a lot about it at work. When Bob walked in on Wednesday morning for his usual, I couldn’t help but tell him the news. That’s when I found out he was the mystery birdhouse-builder. He was happy to share the way in which he was helping the little guys around campus and rattled off his impressive stats. There are around 180 purple martins housed in front of Harding Press and around 150 bluebirds raised around campus that will be returning for the new season. Bob also has plans to install cameras to view the happenings of our friends. He told me it’s his 49th year of being a purple martin landlord. I couldn’t help but think about how our lives almost missed each other but didn’t.
My friend Willie is the wrangler of cats around Midnight Oil that sometimes let people catch them. Willie taught me how to play chess and roll a cigarette, only one of which is a skill I practice. Willie normally brings his own coffee to MO, and I’ve never seen him without an opinion, especially when it comes to seatbelts. I met him sophomore year when I accidentally sat in his seat and he asked me what I was reading. He liked my jokes, and I liked that cats followed him wherever he went. Now we talk about life, occasionally write songs with Hannah Atkins and brainstorm new article topics. Our lives should have missed each other, and I now get to know all the names of the cats that grace MO’s porch.
We often move through our lives only looking at destinations. White spaces in personal planners are rare. We reduce our lives to clubs, majors, extracurriculars or sports ― anything that gives us straightforward status or achievement. We want God to show up only in the spectacular, so we force ourselves to be nothing less than amazing. The in-between becomes a sign of laziness. Capitalistic culture consumes us and trains us to view anything that doesn’t produce something as a failure. How do we compare this to the biblical principle of rest, of Sabbath?
Sabbath is a practice that doesn’t just happen. It is a choice to rest. In today’s context, it means setting aside time to find birdhouses or sit at MO and talk about the news. My friendships with Bob and Willie have blessed me because I allowed space for myself to do nothing but rest in their community. I could have been more concerned about the fact that these conversations don’t add anything I could put in a graduate school application. Instead, I saw the value in taking time to build a community based on something other than accolades. I find God reveals himself more in the wind than in the earthquakes.
Now I make empty spaces in my calendar for moments I can enjoy. I make sure to keep an eye out for numbered birdhouses, and I always carry cat treats in my backpack. I want to make sure my life is more than just walking to my next appointment. This is how I Sabbath.
