On Sabbath: Rest and Restoration

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy”1

This verse has gone from something of a demanding command to a Godsend. What does it mean to keep the Sabbath holy? While some might not want to leave that up to interpretation, it rings differently for me these days than when I was younger. For me, keeping the Sabbath holy (or, set apart) means to respect it for how it’s given for the good of my soul. This reversal has helped me to better receive Jesus’s words - “The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.”2

While I’ve gotten better at receiving the Sabbath as an essential but unforced gift from God, I have yet to fully and best receive it.

I only started guarding off and attempting to keep a Sabbath day in earnest in the past few years. There have been times in my life where it hasn’t been on my radar, times where I made excuses (that seemed legitimate at the time) on why I couldn’t, and, yes, even some circumstances where my Sabbath had to be paused or deferred because a “sheep stuck in a well”3 would pop up on that chosen day.

But two factors push against my Sabbath these days:

1. The easier problem to fix (theoretically… ugh) is preparation for the Sabbath. Even today as I understand it, Jews will prepare for the Sabbath a day before, knocking out all the chores, preparing all the food, knocking out any potential threat to how their Sabbath should look. My wife and I are still trying to get our heads around this one, and thankfully, that cognizance will help us get there.

2. The problem that I haven’t been able to figure out is HOW TO Sabbath. Again, pointing to what I’ve heard of with a Jewish Sabbath, it’s not just hitting up a service and then commencing to loaf. In reading Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel4 as well as other accounts, the view that is given is going to synagogue, coming home, engaging with scripture, family, meals, arts… Things that do sound pretty Sabbathy.

I say that number two is more difficult because I’ve only ever done it correctly by accident. 

If there is a trend I groan over in my life, it’s that when something goes “perfectly”, I can never reverse-engineer it. And I think there are a few reasons for that - one of them likely being that such a methodology to understanding and applying things MIGHT fix something, but it also might break something(s) as well. On top of that, each day is different, and what is going on outside of us and inside of us is no exception. A good plan is, by nature, flexible, because we live in imperfect circumstances and aren’t always our best selves. The best we can do is understand how to stay in flow - and not do so by any form of force. Just the question of “How to Sabbath” feels a bit more forced than seems right as it is.

A realization dawned on me when I started to take the Sabbath more seriously than ever, that Sabbath isn’t just about rest. It’s about rest AND restoration. Rest without restoration isn’t rest, and vice versa. While I try to avoid furthering and self-applying airtight logic, it’s hard to refute.

(And in all fairness, I probably read it and stole it from someone - if someone can point that out to me, I’d love to know - sounds like it was a pretty good book, whatever one it was)

The “rest” part seems to me to be the easiest. Any fellow fans of (American) football can attest to this (well, unless you are a fantasy football type - y’alls Monday conversations tend to ooze frustration). And, like my wife and I, anyone with young kids is likely saying “um… no.” Either way, just chilling and shirking the non-essentials (including the essentials we want to hang onto that could’ve been handled yesterday or can wait until tomorrow) is at least easier for most of us to get our heads around. For the more driven types, probably not, but I’d wager there are more examples of what rest DEFINITIVELY looks like as opposed to what “restorative” things look like.

Enter the complication - what does it mean for something to be restorative?

I think there are some easy examples to pull from what I mentioned above to do better in truly keeping the Sabbath.

We can engage with God in prayer and through other practices - reading (scripture or books) being the most common, but also through solitude, silence, contemplation, and other practices and disciplines. Hopefully, this is the day of the week that getting that fuller and more direct engagement with whatever it is that personally helps each of us fully receive our union with God.

We can go to our local Christ-community gathering. Here, we can spend time with others who gather with us, exchange bits of our souls with each other, and receive a message to contemplate on and (hopefully) fill us up with a bit more living water for the week’s journey ahead. When we weed out the feeling that we MUST gather on our local body’s given day, we can ask ourselves “Is this restorative? Why or why not? If I’m going to keep meeting with fellow believers, what do I need to do?”

We can spend time with our family or friends - eating good food together, enjoying each other’s company, receiving this time as a better chance to fully receive each other than any other point in our weeks. Add some good entertainment like a game, a movie or just some full-hearted fooling around and it seems pretty complete. Intimate connection with people we love is dyed into the wool of our being - we were created for union with God and common-union with each other.

And regardless if you’re an introvert or an extrovert, the Sabbath should be able to help you recharge your cells - however that works for each of us in our individual and unique mixes of those two ways of engaging with ourselves and others (God can surely meet us in either).

And, yes, sports, entertainment, whatever your reasonable pleasure is, get some of it in there - just be cautious and aware of what is “too much”. For me, after two or three football games, I have a sad realization that one (maybe two on a really lazy Sunday) was enough, and my inability to run the clock back leaves me feeling empty and dazed. Which causes me to question if that even belongs in the restoration category - I’m realizing in real-time (of my writing this, anyways) that some things that SEEM restorative actually belong in the category of rest - or maybe even falling short of being in either of those two categories, which would be the worst-case-scenario.

Which, as I’m writing this, is helping me to see my personal lenses obscuring the wider vision. I personally gravitate towards rest far more easily. Give me a lazy day and a couch to do it on and I need little else. I’m a self-preservation enneagram 9, and those that know are saying “ah”, and for those that don’t: I’m the type of person who withdraws into as much of and as many of my preferred comforts as possible. The more delicious, entertaining AND immobile, the better - at least, I’m easily bamboozled into thinking so5.

But that’s not true for someone who would be more prone to the items in that “restoration” list. Someone could easily fill up the day with activities and sensory-drivers that leave them exhausted at the end of the day. They wake up the next morning feeling burnt out - the strange anomaly of having gone to the “humanity gas-pump”, filled the tank to the stopping point, and “driving” off only to realize that they’re still running on fumes.

It’s a balance. A balance that comes out of wisdom. A balance that respects our minds, bodies and hearts equally. A balance that we pay attention to and tweak the parameters of over time until we can operate in “flow” without needing to course-correct, much less think about it.

Yep, it takes a bit of work before it no longer becomes work. A bit ironic for the Sabbath, right? But we work ourselves into a bad spot by default anyways, and one of a vicious cycle at that. Why not work towards the sweet-spot, where we don’t have to work at this anymore, aside from a bit of flexibility and an ability to effortlessly pivot? Sure, it’s not completely perfect - but I think we’ll all gladly take “as perfect as it gets”.

And then the wisdom to not broadly apply what is best for each of us is absolutely necessary. It can be tempting to feel like we’ve cracked the code and that everyone just needs to get with our new and perfect program for the perfect Sabbath (que up a “5 things you need for a perfect Sabbath” blog to infiltrate the social media feeds). But Sabbath is very personal, which could seem like a problem - how do we all Sabbath well, and in proximity and connection to each other?

The answer to that is harmony. It’s not just respecting differences, it’s seeing the value in our differences and helping support each other in them. Which, yes, is not always possible - some things that others do are destructive, and we can’t get behind it. Other things are things that are not necessarily destructive but are difficult for us to agree on. The former we have to avoid as gracefully as possible, and the latter we have to apply grace to both sides in order to respect differences while celebrating commonalities - which, if we can stand back and realize it, we have more in common than we do different. 

My wife and I have our own push-and-pull scenario going on with a given Sabbath. I want to chill - that makes me happy on a given Sunday. For her, she likes to do some tidying and tasks that she wanted to do during the week but couldn’t. I used to nag at her about it, but I stopped - through her explanation and my observation, I realized that this was restorative to her, and it was more difficult to rest when things were not done. I’m not so different - if the house is a mess, I don’t feel like I can rest well. I have to make peace with a bit of tidying to get true rest and carve out space for restorative practices.

So, with differences in how our Sabbaths play out, we’ll have to understand. And with others who are in Christ that we share more of ourselves with, asking for accountability is great. If I’m not doing what I’ve told someone else is best for me to do on a Sabbath, it’s a mercy to ask questions, not an annoyance (ok, I might get annoyed, but give me a minute to calm down and I’ll think about thanking you later). We think of correction as such an intrusive thing until we can see the result and, inherently, the love in it. And when we have to do this with each other given the fact that a good Sabbath is different for each of us, it becomes harmonious and intimate. It has to be - if we haven’t sought to understand how each of us best receives that day, we’re not loving each other for who each of us distinctly is. This, amongst other things, is how we build up the love and grace muscles and, in turn, return to the selves we were created to be.

And it all starts with giving ourselves grace with our own Sabbath flow. Trying to be flexible and wise on how each of us chooses to do it. Forgiving ourselves and repenting when we do it in a way that doesn’t fill us up. Paying attention to the health of our souls and rethinking our Sabbath when our circumstances shift and something new is needed6. Giving ourselves this grace and giving God gratitude for finding it is essential for affording others the space and grace they need to fully receive the Sabbath.

May The Lord give you the wisdom needed to Sabbath well, and a double-portion of God’s presence on it.

1 Exod 20:8 - New Revised Standard Version: Updated Edition (Friendship Press, 2021)

2 Mark 2:27 - New Revised Standard Version: Updated Edition (Friendship Press, 2021)

3 11 He said to them, “Suppose one of you has only one sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath; will you not lay hold of it and lift it out? 12 How much more valuable is a human being than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.”

New Revised Standard Version: Updated Edition (Friendship Press, 2021), Mt 12:11–12.

4 Heschel, A. J. (n.d.). The Sabbath. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

5 Chestnut, B. (2013). The complete Enneagram: 27 Paths to Greater Self-Knowledge. Simon and Schuster.

6 36 He also told them a parable: “No one tears a patch from a new garment and puts it on an old garment. Otherwise, not only will he tear the new, but also the piece from the new garment will not match the old. 37 And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins, it will spill, and the skins will be ruined. 38 No, new wine is put into fresh wineskins. 39 And no one, after drinking old wine, wants new, because he says, ‘The old is better.’ ” 

Christian Standard Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020), Lk 5:36–39.