“And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.”
In Genesis 1, our story opens up with our creator going through movements and rhythms of work. Making the days, nights, oceans, galaxies, filling the former void with the textures of mountains and animals of sky and land to move about. He creates all of this and with each movement, he steps back to say, "this is good."
Genesis 2 opens up with a very interesting verse about how after 6 days of heavy but wondrous work, God rested.
God...who needs no rest...rested? Back to that later.
I love to work. I get to be creative and work with extremely talented people day in and day out.
For the last nine or ten years, I've established this rhythm where I would work myself silly and then for my "sabbath" I would completely disengage from the people around me.
That's what sabbath is, right? A day to disengage? A day to Netflix binge until your eyes fall out and eat as many Little Debbie Donuts as your stomach can handle without getting pumped?
That was always my understanding of what Sabbath was. A day to do as much nothing as possible.
Over the last few months the Lord has been speaking to me this simple phrase that for all its kindness, haunted me:
"Out of rhythm."
How dare He? How dare He say I'm out of rhythm? I work hard. I support my family. I pray. I read the Bible. Out of rhythm? He must be mistaken.
What I did notice is that as the Lord was telling me this, I was in a season where I felt the cold and desolate hands of anxiety wrap around my heart. Days where I was so anxious I couldn't even leave my house and come in to work.
Long story short: my heart was aching for true sabbath. A time to healthily disengage from my work but to reengage with God, my family and my own spirit man.
So how does true sabbath work for me and my family?
We sabbath from Friday night at 5pm and go til Saturday night at 5 pm. 24 hours of pure, soul-filling goodness.
No TV. I love TV--but if I'm honest it robs my time ruthlessly and fosters an environment that produces a counterfeit of quality time of the person sitting next to me (usually my wife).
No email. In today's culture, we often forget that not everything is urgent. I used to check my email an ungodly amount of times every day. If you're like me in that regard, what helped me is to completely remove it from my phone.
No shopping. I love new gadgets and fresh running shoes as much as the next guy but Sabbath is an opportunity to be aware of what God has already blessed us with.
Instead of different things that may take attention away from my family and The Lord, we spend a few moments in prayer to center our hearts in a place to hear Him, ask him to renew us physically, emotionally and spiritually, and to be grateful to Him for the blessings we have.
After that, we are welcome to do anything if it falls into two categories: rest and worship. We make a meal or pick a restaurant we've been eyeing, we play board games, drink wine, take walks. We reengage with God and the paradox of that is, it causes us to reengage with each other.
As my wife and I began on this journey, we realized that Sabbath set us up to come back to work with a deep sense of wonder and energy that can't be manufactured by anything but the Spirit, Himself.
God created work. He created Adam and eve and told them to be fruitful and multiply. Build bridges. Create businesses. Take pictures. Design tall buildings. Make babies and take them to soccer practice.
Work is good. But it's not who you are. Sabbath is a day to remind you that even in your rest, the world keeps spinning. It's a day to remember that you are not God. A day devoted to just being in the center of His pleasure.
When Genesis said that God rested, it doesn't mean that God just spent the day sleeping. He wasn't tired. He can't be tired. In a modern paraphrase it means that God took a step back to enjoy the fruits of his labor and delight in it.
Isn't that good?
May you, my friends, establish a rhythm of working excellently and taking a day, any day, to take a step back and delight in your life. To focus your energies on being in the center of The Lord's pleasure and reengage with your source. That is how we fulfill our mandate to be fruitful and multiply the way we were intended.