After an uneventful day of travel we are settled in Cleveland. It is nice for us to have a weekend, that is not usually how our schedule works!

Seven the Sabbatical. It took me about seven seconds to think of this title once the decision was made to go ahead and blog after an early Sunday morning discussion that lasted about seven minutes. Of course, later that day and part of the next it took me about seven hours to figure out how to get back to a blog I had almost started once before. By then I was having fun with the number seven and the word sabbatical. This seemed fitting for the beginning of a Sabbatical that is to last seven weeks. Seven letters in the word Demotte. And Indiana. Seven unique notes in the musical scale. Seven colors in the rainbow (remember Roy G. Biv?) Seven orange barrels in my front yard for the new sidewalk. Seven goldfish in my little pond. That was literary license. There are really only six. And then I did some googling. Did you know there are seven spots on a ladybug? I didn't, and now this is seriously bugging (Ha!) me. How that does work, three on one wing and four on the other?

Combining a search for seven and sabbatical in Google (yesterday's comment was about a search that also included the word blog) led to much larger things. I was simply playing with words and giving the results absolutely no significance other than my own recreational brain jigglings at the same level as a crossword puzzle or a good game of scrabble. This stuff was opening up such a deeper level. Sure, some of it was a little bit helpful, such as the historical explanation of the seven year cycle of rest, and then the Jubilee in the 50th year after the seventh cycle of seven. But even a tiny step deeper in this topic was taking me places I did not want to go. Witchcraft. Sacred symbolism of numbers and so much more. Darkness disguised as light. Wrong disguised as right. It was for me a time to be reminded of Ephesions 6:12 -- "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual host of wickedness in the heavenly places."

So tomorrow we go to worship the One who is the Light of the World. The One who shatters that darkness and warns us to have nothing to do with it. The One who tells us in the verses that follow the one above to put on the Whole Armor of God. And then to stand. Stand.

And maybe later in the day I will have some Seven-Up.

Seven. The Sabbatical.