Christian Comment with Revd Dr Simon Topping - Methodist Minister for the Stroud area churches

THE summer season has now arrived and many people will be enjoying their annual breaks.

Holidays help us establish a healthy balance between work and rest.

And I think the pursuit of “balance” is something central to Christian faith and practice.

The Old Testament Sabbath laws are a good example of this principle of balance: the seventh day of rest allows for restoration and recovery so that human, animal and natural resources, depleted through six day of productive use, are not irreversibly exhausted, but rather a healthy, life-enhancing balance is sustained between activity, production, consumption, and then rest, recovery and replenishment.

The same principle lies behind the biblical law relating to the seventh year of fallow.

During the six years of productive use, there is progressive extraction from the earth of its essential nutrients and richness.

It experiences degradation and depletion. But this phase of extraction is then balanced out by opportunity for the replenishment of those nutrients during the fallow year.

This repeating return to a state of life-enhancing equilibrium, is also at work within the biblical laws relating to the Jubilee year.

The Jubilee year occurs every fifty years and in that year debts and credits are cancelled out, land is redistributed back to its original owners and slaves recover their liberty.

Again, the goal is a return to a state of social, economic and environmental equilibrium in a way that encourages both human and non-human flourishing.

In contrast, human activity which encourages or tolerates irreversible depletion or exhaustion of people, animals or earth, undermines this balanced economy of God and is regarded as sinful activity.

Sadly, we have lost this sense of balance: our natural resources are consumed and depleted without opportunity for replenishment, few people achieve a healthy balance between work and rest, some are overworked, others are underemployed - even getting the right balance between hours asleep and hours awake is difficult for many.

So let us reclaim a life-enhancing balance, in our work and rest, in our relationship with the environment and in our sharing of the world’s resources and wealth.