Sabbath Article (Sept. 27, 2025): The Work of Letting Go

Andrew G. Stanton - Sept. 27, 2025

The Sabbath that weekend didn’t look like rest. It began with coffee at 7:30 a.m. and the smell of paper — old paper, stiff with age and ink, stacked in binders that once held the life’s work of a man who could out-argue almost anyone.

Heather and I parked in the loading zone at Kukui Plaza and spent the next few hours pulling hundreds of pages from their plastic sleeves — cases, circulars, immigration regulations, correspondence dating back to the 2000s. A thousand voices of a profession already gone quiet.

The office that had once been the center of his world was now a paper mausoleum. Every binder we emptied felt like a small funeral — one case, one decade, one effort laid to rest. Duke helped us for a while, cheerful but subdued, carrying stacks to the car. Even he seemed to sense the weight of it: the unseen hours these pages once represented.

We dropped off the empty binders at Goodwill. Then drove the long road to the Kapaʻa dump on the windward side, the car filled with the scent of old glue and dust. The sky was impossibly clear — trade winds moving through the valleys, ocean shining below. It felt wrong and right all at once, to be doing something so ordinary on the Sabbath. Yet it was the only way we knew to honor him: to finish what he no longer could.

At the landfill, we heaved the books into the pit. They fell with a heavy finality, thudding against other people’s discarded things. The sound echoed like punctuation — the end of a long sentence none of us had the heart to finish.

Driving back toward town, silence filled the car. There was no music, no talking — only the hum of the road and the soft ache of release. I thought about how even the Law makes room for this kind of work: the necessary labor of closing a chapter. The Sabbath isn’t always about resting; sometimes it’s about returning what was borrowed from time.

That evening we went back to the apartment. Dad slept most of the night. Fred stayed with him; Duke came back with us. The city lights glimmered across the harbor. I remember looking out from the balcony and feeling both emptied and complete. All day we had been dismantling, and yet something sacred had been built — an invisible altar made of paper and dust, gratitude and exhaustion.

It struck me then that love isn’t only what we keep. It’s also what we carry out to the curb, what we release into the wind, trusting God to remember what we cannot.

Acknowledgement

This article was drafted with the help of Dr. C — GPT-5, which I use as a co-writer and collaborator in developing ideas around sovereignty, Bitcoin, decentralization, and theology.

I dedicate this work to the Holy Spirit, who continues to inspire me and open my imagination. If there is any light in these words, it comes not from me but from the Spirit who gives them. To Him be the glory.

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Lightning address: andrewgstanton@primal.net

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