It’s Sunday here in Samoa. So no work. I’m going to try to say this without Samoa bashing, or Christian bashing or sounding overly negative, cynical or going too deep on a Sunday, and I just KNOW that I’m going to fail – probably on all counts. So you know what’s coming don’t you?
Yep. It’s about this Sunday no work thing, I’m fuming, frustrated, furious and probably anything else that starts with ‘F’ – well sort of. In the end I settled on the ‘F’ word FUN and reckon that today is just a day for fun.
It goes like this.
The THEORY (i.e. the Law here): Sunday is a day that you don’t work. You go to church, you have the To’onai then spend the day with your family.
INTERPRETED (i.e. what really happens): You cook the Umu (which is actually much more work than the other normal days and would have the Jewish Rabbis stomping their hobnail boots on you), you then go to church, which is a long walk for some (more work) and you sing, pray and do other godly things for three hours (that’s not work? It’s hard work for me!) then walk home, eat and sleep. The children actually eat and sleep in another Fale out the back so family time for many means that everybody is “sort-of” but not actually together.
OK, now sometimes some families are different, and not all Samoans do the same thing the same way, and yes, I am being a bit cynical about this but let’s ask a few questions about it. This is the FUN part of my day!
The Sabbath is a Saturday. So God’s really not happy with all the churchies who set laws to worhsip on Sunday. If you’re going to make laws and enforce them and call it God’s thing then isn’t it sort of important to get the day right? The SDAs are dead right about this one. The Catholics changed the day from Saturday to Sunday and freely admit it. Bother, now I’ve upset the Christians AND the Samoans in one go!
OK so let’s just assume for one little moment that the day doesn’t really matter, especially as it’s Sunday in my country when it’s Saturday in someone elses. or the other way round which I can never get right. (This is a little closer to my own theological take on things BTW). So it’s either day, whatever day you chose or whatever country you choose.
There’s two ways I see to approach this – looking at my own personal circumstances and assessing the Law the way it affects me OR looking at my own personal circumstances and assessing the Law the way it affects me. Sorry, your theology doesn’t bother me because my feet only fit my jandals – not yours. I reckon that I’m up to face my Maker one day and your advice might be fine for you, but I don’t think “But he said, she said” is going to work the trick somehow when I’m at the pearly gates! Anyway those are the only two ways that matter for me. (Yes I know they are the same. It’s not a typo!)
So, I shouldn’t work. So what is work? Web development. That’s my profession for the last 10 years. OK I don’t do any development any more. Other people now do that. So what about painting the offices or putting a deck out the front for the staff? I’m sort of in construction – on average two months every year so is this sort of OK? What about blogging? I’m a semi-professional blogger. They say that they like my style and that they do business with me because I talk sense (well a lot of the time) so am I working when I am blogging? In some ways I am. What about programming. I enjoy knocking out a few reports or systems in PHP. But that’s always business related so even though I do it in my spare time for fun, because it’s related to a business it’s work too?
OK So you can see I’m really having FUN now – I think I like Sundays all of a sudden taking the mickey out of this Sunday thing!
OK So let’s get really serious about this. Cross your heart and pray to God – what is your real work? Then you’ll get closer to the application of these universal Sunday laws to your own situation. Ta Daaaaaa! Eureka. No matter whether I am in construction, software, websites or blogging, I am a professional entrepreneur. Yup that’s me all over. A creative-gifted. I eat, sleep, think and dream up cool ideas all day, every day and even most of the night! I conceptualise businesses, think about ways to help people and change the world (OK leave that one out for the moment) and then how to make money pay the bills 99.9% of the waking day and 49.5% of the sleeping night.
So there we have it. Stop thinking on a Sunday and God will be happy with you, so will the church and all of Samoa.
Nah, sorry. Life’s too short to do that, and I’m having too much fun. God told me I’m OK and He loves me, so there I’ll be quiet and sensitive about it. I’ll sit outside my office here on my newly built deck in the shade of some palm trees up here in paradise enjoying the neighbours bananas and eyeing up the coconut trees and watching the birds sing and dance and mate; the gheckos and lizards and ants all running about the place, the dogs and Samoans wander past at a rate of knots (about two or three to be precise), and I’ll think away furiously to spite them all. And they’ll think to themselves – Oh that good Palagi – he doesn’t do ANY work on a Sunday. Every day he sits there doing the right thing praying away.
The Jews developed an intricate set of rules for living. Their primary commandments came from God and Moses made it quite clear how important they were. Over the centuries, they developed a secondary set of rules (laws) that they worked out to prevent themselves breaking the first set of rules accidentally. So for example if God said you weren’t allowed swim in salt water on a Sunday, their secondary laws might say – no swimming in ANY water on a Sabbath. But after a while these guys who are experts at intellectual niceties developed a third set of laws (that only they could know or understand, and then they too were always arguing about Clause 15c, subsection 45d of some obsure ruling some 346 years previously). So it might go like this: Don’t clean yourself with any water that wasn’t sterilised first for 16.5 hours before the Sabbath (because that would be how long it takes for salt water to disspate) so that you couldn’t accidentally “swim” in sea water on the Sababth. They may also say to hide the salt pot for the 24 hours before the Sabbath and don’t go to the beach the day before, unless you washed your feet when you came out OR you didn’t walk on the sand. OK all this is made up, but you get the idea.
Samoa as far as I can see is fairly and squarely at the second level in this scheme of things for churchy type laws. Some villages are very close to the third level from what I see. Legalism and Churchianity is very much alive in Samoa from what I see and boy, the Sunday thing is a big DO NOT TOUCHEE this elephant in the room. Samoa is my home now so I don’t want to rattle the cage here, but between my mates and me, well we can have some Sunday fun eh?
Sorry to go on about the God thing so much here in Samoa, but this is just how the place is. Honestly!
My work continues though 7 days a week. Life is too short not to have some fun eh?
B L O G – T H I N K – T H I N K – B L O G – T H I N K – T H I N K!
Oops there goes the church bells again calling me to stop thinking.
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