I don't think I would have expected this when I first started parenting seven years ago, but my kids actually seem to like time outs. The "time out" is often used as a disciplinary action for kids; it's called a "time out" because the parent (or teacher or adult in charge) asks the kid to take a break from the unhelpful activity they are doing for a while - hitting a sibling, having a tantrum, pulling the cat's tail - and go sit in a corner, or on a step, taking a few minutes to put physical and mental space between the kid and the cause of the tantrum or fight. 

So, it can function kind of like a punishment and I didn't really expect that my kids would like it. But after a while, they started sometimes putting themselves in "time outs" especially when they knew they were getting too invested in something, too out of control for whatever situation they were in. I wouldn't even necessarily know they were in "time out" but I'd walk around a corner and find one of my kids sitting quietly: "Shhhh, Mama. I'm taking a time out for a bit."

 

I'm pondering time outs this week as we, the church, live out this first week of ordinary time. The Christmas holiday was big and extravagant and, for many people, featured a vacation or break of some kind - an opportunity to get away from work and focus on family and friends and the meaning of the holidays. Now that we're in ordinary time, that holiday break is gone and we seem to be back in the thick of work and life and NON-breaks.

 

But today's scriptures seem to be suggesting that perhaps the "ordinary time break" - a time out of sorts - is here in its place. Indeed, the first reading (Hebrews 4:1-5; 11) focuses on "resting in the Lord". The author of Hebrews connects resting with not disobeying God "like our ancestors did." Not being disobedient - and therefore being at rest in the Lord - means being able to listen to God, to do what God asks of us, and to believe in the Good News.

 

The Gospel (Mark 2:1-12) highlights the relationship between rest and disobedience perhaps even a bit more. I suspect most people in Jesus' audience - indeed, maybe most of us! - would think that healing paralyzed limbs is far more extraordinary than healing sins. But Jesus clearly means to emphasize forgiveness of sins here - and sins are really quite ordinary, quite a part of our lives. I might, at some point in my life, be paralyzed, but I know for a fact that I am a sinner - sin is that ubiquitous and ordinary. 

 

Yet, the fact that Jesus pairs healing sins with what we might see as the more extraordinary healing of limbs emphasizes that this fairly ordinary part of our life - sin - is something that can be extraordinarily forgiven, again and again. Jesus gives the paralyzed man - who is paralyzed both from his sin and physically - the opportunity for a break from being paralyzed. He gets to have a chance for a time out - a time to renew, reflect and attempt to be "at rest in the Lord" just as the first reading commands us to do.

 

Jesus offers all of us a chance for an "ordinary time" break - a chance to rest in the Lord. Today, let us think about what separates us from this chance for a break. Where are our sins, the places where we are disobedient? And let us listen more closely to God and actively seek a "time out" where we can encounter Jesus in our every day lives.

 

- Jana M. Bennett