Slideshow image

On Sunday we talked about the importance of and the gift of solitude and silence. In light of the message, Glenn Robitaille emailed me a February 22 article from the Toronto Sun. The article is about a growing movement in Canada called Park Prescriptions (www.parkprescriptions.ca). Park Prescriptions is a cooperative group promoting medical prescriptions of time in nature based on evidence based research. Article author, Nazanin Meshkat, reports: 

A strong body of research shows that those who spend as little as 20 to 30 minutes a day outdoors report better health outcomes, including regulation of blood pressure, diabetes, mental health, and boosted immune response. Other benefits are improved concentration, sleep and sense of well-being.

“By formalizing nature prescriptions with a defined program, we can start to create a culture change within our profession and the public that recognizes nature time as essential for health,” says Melissa Lem, a family physician in B.C. and the director of Park Prescriptions.

(read the entire article at https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2021/02/22/ontario-doctors-set-to-turn-over-a-new-leaf-with-program-that-lets-them-prescribe-nature-to-ailing-patients.html)

This growing movement reveals that we are at a place today where medical providers need to write a prescription and create a plan for rest before many people will embrace it. As I read it I had the thought...maybe God actually knew what was best for us when it was commanded in the Bible millenia ago! Perhaps, the creator of humanity was aware of what we need and that was why it was prescribed for us!

When we read an ancient book it is easy to read commands in it and presume they don't mean anything for us today. After all, we are in such a radically different place and time today than those people were! We're grown so much beyond those primative people that surely the things that required of them have no bearing on us today!

What if there was a different approach to those commands. What if rather than looking at how different we are from those people and disregarding what they were told, we considered that God is smart enough to know what is best and wrestled with the commands to understand how what was said was meant for humanity's best? And then, as we see how it was mean for the best then we can understand how it could work out for our best, too.

Let me try to be clear here. I'm not saying that every command in the Bible is directly applicable to us today. I think my pants are a blend of fabrics, for example. (See Leviticus 19:19) But what I am suggesting is that when God gave commands they weren't capricious or controlling or random or irrelevant. They were given, when they were given, as a gift to his people for a reason. If we can grapple with the reason we may find an underlying principle or discover that they were addressing a specific cultural reality. And through what we find, they can help give us life today!

For example...Sabbath. Take one day per week to rest, unplug, cease working, feast, and play. This was, in Jesus' words, given as a gift from God "made to meet the needs of people." (Mark 2:27 - NLT) Maybe God actually knew what was best about when telling people (over and over and over again) to prioritize rest! This is not meant to be a burden. It is meant to be a gift.

So receive it! Get outside. Go for a walk. Listen to the birds of spring as they are singing loudly. Breathe in the fresh air and the presence of the Spirit. Even if it's only for 20 minutes, you will be better for it. And if that doesn't convince you...

It's the Doctor's orders.

Comments for this post are now off.