The art of the full stop

Everything that has a start, also has a end. It's the way things tend to work: mobile phone battery, Christmas ribbons, the chorus-bridge loop in worship songs (thank goodness), a warm cup of tea, spending time with loved ones, long-winded blog posts... and even life itself.

For the most part we tend to want the difficult, bad, challenging things to end quicker. We also want the nice, fun, good things to go on forever. There is, however, an art and a necessity to putting a full stop in the right place; after the good and the bad.

As a musician and aspiring creative I often find it hard to know when to stop. Adding another verse to a song doesn't always make the song better (Charles Wesley may disagree...). Using too many words when trying to explain something can often lead to more confusion than clarity. Adding more objects to a picture than is necessary can create so much noise that the message gets lost. I can go on, but I'll stop there... for now...

We find the perfect example of knowing when to stop in the creation narrative of Genesis. At the end of Genesis 1 we read that "God saw all that He had made, and it was very good." That's what one would expect from the almighty, all-wise, all-powerful Creator. And God being God one might expect Him to be more than able to carry on creating perfection.

But then, unexpectedly, we read at the beginning of Genesis 2 "By the seventh day God had finished the work He had been doing; so on the seventh day He rested from all His work." The Hebrew word translated to "rested" here is shabath which means rest, cease or desist. It's the word we get 'sabbath' from: the day of holy rest.

When I think of God, I don't think of Him as someone who gets tired. Isaiah 40:28 and Psalm 121:3-4 confirms this, which makes me think that God would have been very much able to continue creating. He didn't stop (shabath) because He was tired. He stopped because He saw that creation was good - very good - and that was good enough.

So maybe we should follow the example of our Creator. Maybe we should recognise when enough is good enough. Maybe we should recognise when bad is bad enough. And then stop. The writer of Ecclesiastes seems to get it in chapter 3 when he writes that there is a time for everything. A time to start, and a time to stop.

However, God's example does not give us permission to leave our work unfinished. God, who finished creation, did very good work (in His own words). He will also see the good work He started in each of us through to the end (Philippians 1:6). He also expects us to do our best in whatever we do (Colossians 3:23). And then we should make full use of the full stop.

May you have the wisdom to know when it is time for a full stop.

I can go on, but I won't.

Selah