Whether it is due to germaphobia, conviction-a-phobia, agoraphobia, extrovert-a-phobia, or dissonance-a-phobia, many Christians prefer to spend their day of rest and worship far away from other people. A recent trend, taking this preference to an extreme, is the practice of, on the Sabbath day, driving a SUV into the mountains and/or other wilderness to get as far away from other people as possible. This increasingly popular form of escapism is known as Sabbath-jeeping.
Nothing gets you farther away from slimy handshakes and the crazy lady who hugs everyone like a 3-hour trek into the hill country on a trail barely passable by a mountain goat. What better way could there be to commune with God than to breathe the clean air (with the occasional whiff of overheated brakes)?
Could there be a more powerful way to learn to trust God and rely on His power than white-knuckling it down a mountain pass while your wife screams at you for getting too close to the edge on the road nicknamed Axle-Cracker?
And the best thing? Since Sabbath-jeeping doesn't involve actual work, it isn't a violation of the biblical commands about
Sabbath-keeping.