Sabbath Celebration

What I love about our homeschool curriculum is that we get to experience what we learn and it's not just facts on a page.  This year we began a four year journey through history and we started at the very beginning - creation.  After six days of creating everything, God rested on the 7th day and established the Sabbath.  So, we celebrated Sabbath (Jewish style).  We've never done that before, but it was really neat and we learned a whole lot!  The symbolism is awesome.  I also love the memories we were able to create together as a family.  I took some pictures...

This is the challah (bread) covering that Josiah made for us.  He's quite an artist!

Here's all the boys as we sat down to begin the celebration.  John grilled some lamb chops for us for dinner - DELISH!!  (We recently bought a sheep and had it butchered.  We are totally hooked on lamb meat now!) 

John then gave each son a blessing.  What a special time! 

And then he read some of Proverbs 31 to me and greatly encouraged me with the boys watching.  I teared up...  it was such a blessing to me. 

Next was the washing of hands... 

We read several blessings and praises to the Lord.  We took special care to "tear" our bread and not to cut it.  Our knives were covered with napkins as a symbol of peace.  Our candles representing creation and redemption were lit.  We picked fresh flowers from our yard to decorate our table for the speical meal.  And we ate at dusk just as the Sabbath day would begin.  We enjoyed it!

To end Sabbath, we had a lamb roast meal the next evning just before dusk after spending a relaxing day together.  This was a casual meal.  As we finished eating, Shepard passed around the spice box that we made so that everyone could savor the aroma of Sabbath before it was gone and as a savory memory until we could celebrate it again.

Now we all headed outside to watch the sky to see who could be the first one to find the first three stars of the night.  When the first three stars are visible, then Sabbath is over.  John won!  He has the best eyes of all of us. Then John and I sat on the porch and watched the boys play in the fading light.  Wonderful.