Sunday Morning - a picture to hang on a peg.

Sunday Morning by A.B. Durand

    I was raised in a Southern Baptist minister's family. My dad was a pastor, what we might now call a "senior pastor".  Sunday mornings as you might understand, were very important to my family. Mom would put on a vinyl of George Beverly Shea, Dad would be standing, shaving at the mirror, reciting his sermon and Steve and I would be hiding under the covers waiting until the last possible threat from our mom before getting up. No one was allowed to be emotional or loud on Sunday morning. Dad wanted a certain atmosphere so he would be ready for the "Sunday show". It was Sunday morning, after all, the Lord's Day.
     All my years growing up in our home we had a picture on our living room wall entitled, "Sunday Morning". It was a colonial era picture of a family walking out of their home going to church. The artist was A. B. Durand. After I married and I had a family of my own, I told my natural family I wanted this picture for myself. That was a mistake. Suddenly the value of that painting skyrocketed and everybody including some visiting ministers wanted that picture! It has since "disappeared" into the dark recesses of my family.
       Thinking about that picture made me decide that I would just get a copy and have it framed and be done with it. So I began, not knowing the painter's name, to google "Sunday Morning" and I clicked "image". How difficult could it be? Sunday morning as it turned out was a popular name for nearly everything imaginable.  Let's see there were; tranquil pastoral scenes, busy streets, gross looking breakfasts of eggs and bacon, alluring men and women, well I could go on but you take a look. The page looked like every thought I'd ever had of anything, except, you guessed it, A.B. Durand's idealized Sunday Morning.
         Sunday Mornings in our day has taken on different meaning from those days of Durand or even mother's tranquil mornings with George Beverly Shea. Sunday used to be the Lord's day! Whatever happened to that concept? Come to think of it,  it was probably Jesus' fault. Wasn't it Jesus who said "Sabbath was made for man not man for the Sabbath"(Mark 2:27 KJV)? One look at that page and we can see what man did with the Sabbath. One in about every 10-12 pictures was a church or something family, everything else was snap shots of man's mind, cluttered and crazy. This was certainly man's Sabbath.
      The Sabbath may be made for man but wasn't man made to honor God? It made me question myself on how much am I honoring the Sabbath or the Lord's day or the Lord on any of His days. I know we do not celebrate Saturdays, but worship on Sunday. Somewhere, it seems, in the shuffle something got lost. If I find a copy of that picture I want to hang it prominently on our wall.  It should symbolize my placing the Lord first in my life. Like the peg, a nail driven into the wall prophesied by Isaiah as a hanger for what the Lord wants (The Peg in a Firm Place, This Week, Volume IX (1978)p 160). To be obedient to what He wants is what the picture now means to me. Sure, I probably have the freedom to do otherwise but the freedom I want is to do His will. I will count myself lucky if I am able to do his will with the time I have. Maybe I am still facing the day with Lord like I did those Sunday mornings hiding under the sheets. Maybe I 'll go get a vinyl, well a mp3, of GB Shea and start facing my day with more of an atmosphere for God, like the painting has been saying all along, "Step out, motion gently to your wife, show her the way down the road to the house of God. Hurry up that son of yours to get that shoe tied. Don't  be late. Get out there behind your father. He's been walking that way for a long time."
  Sunday Morning, an oil on canvas, by Asher Brown Durand.