Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: In it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor any stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the Lord made the heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested on the seventh day: Wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.
I didn't think Sunday afternoons were boring when I was nine years old, the word wasn't even in my vocabulary. It was something though, I knew that as I sat in the house wearing my best clothes and struggling to memorize the fourth commandment. We weren't lazy Christians back then, no shortening it to the first eight words, as they do today. We absorbed the whole thing, just as God gave it to Moses in the words of the King James Bible!
I was beginning to get a grasp of the first two verses, but was stuck on “thy manservant nor thy maidservant”, when I happened to glance out the window. I was shocked, my hair stood straight up, I gazed quickly up the road, expecting Beelzebub himself to appear at any moment. My eldest half-brother, who already married with a family, and living next door to us, was breaking the Sabbath! He had been away from home all week, and apparently there wasn't quite enough firewood inside and he had come out to gather a few more pieces, but to my nine year old mind he might as well have been worshipping a golden calf!
It was more than my mind could fathom and I was certain that something terrible was about to happen. How could my own brother do such a thing? It wasn't as if it had been his manservant or his maidservant, or even his ox or his ass, (as I would learn about later in the tenth commandment) but it was he himself. My faith in the ten commandments had been shattered.
