Practicing Sabbath

[The Midweek Encounter is a ministry of Encounter Church in Kentwood, MI. These posts are reflections on Sunday's message, which can be heard here each week: http://myencounterchurch.org/#/messages-media]

During the month of January, I’m teaching a class that meets from 8:00-11:00. Every day at 9:45, I offer the kids a 15-minute break and tell them that we’ll start something new at 10:00. And so far, every day, at least half of the students have chosen to work through the break. They wrap up what they’re doing around 9:58 and then wait for us to begin something new on the hour.

You’ve probably encountered this many times. You or your kids or your friends become engrossed in something and work frantically to finish it before taking a quick break and then moving on to the next thing.

I watched my daughter do this yesterday afternoon. She is the “Special Person” this week at school and had a book to complete. At first, she was carefully coloring pictures and sounding out words so she could write them accurately. After an hour, she was scribbling and not writing any words at all. Lily loves to color, and I knew that if I let her do one page a day, she would make each page beautiful. But the book was 7 pages long and we didn’t have 7 days to work on it. When I asked her to take a break and finish it later, she replied, “No, I really want to get it all done right now. It will just take a minute.” This no-breaks attitude is one that starts very young, apparently, and follows us through life.

This problem with my class is the same problem that many of us encounter in our every day lives: the work we are doing is engrossing and ongoing. Why take a 15-minute break when there’s more to read, more to write, and a project due next week? Perhaps you’ve faced the same dilemma during your “break” at work or school or while your kids nap in the afternoons. Why take a break when there’s laundry to fold, bills to pay, floors to clean, grocery lists to write, and emails to send?

A CNN article that ran in October of 2014 noted that Americans are now “ taking [the] fewest vacation days in four decades” and that “Americans are work martyrs, [leaving] more and more paid time off unused each year.” The article estimates that workers sacrificed $52.4 billion in vacation compensation in 2013. And as it turns out, it’s all for naught. The article also mentions that those who get the raises and promotions are the ones who are actually taking their allotted vacation days. You can dissect this in all kinds of socioeconomic ways—that the people getting raises and taking vacation days are getting paid vacation time, etc. But the fact remains: Americans rarely call in sick, rarely take personal days, and don’t even take all of their vacation days.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why God commands us to take a Sabbath each week. Maybe God knows that we become fixated on completing tasks or achieving the next goal and so he forces us to take a break. We object, by believing that we don’t need a break to recharge, or by insisting that we really want to just finish the next stage of our projects, but God knows what we need. And what we need is Sabbath.

Today I forced my students to take a 10 minute break.  At 9:50 I told them to stand up and follow me to the hall. And then I told them to return to the classroom at 10:00. They looked at me like I was crazy, but then they all left and came back 10 minutes later. We they happier and more productive? I’m not sure. But if they had planned to meet a friend or do something they were looking forward to during the break, I have no doubt that they would have been refreshed. While I’m certainly not trying to compare myself to God, but I am going to suggest that you can find ways to hold yourself or others accountable to a Sabbath. I don’t mean in a burdensome way; I mean that you can plan something enjoyable and relaxing to do on your Sabbath so that you will take a rest. You can plan to meet friends for lunch, for example, and leave your phone in the car. You can order a new book on Amazon and promise yourself that you’ll start it on Sunday after church or Tuesday or whichever day works best for a break. You can enlist a weekly babysitter so one night each week is date night.  We spend so much of our lives planning our work, that the Sabbath can sometimes feel empty, or like “wasted” time before we can get back to our daily tasks. What if we planned our Sabbath time, just like we plan the rest of our time, so that we would have something restful to look forward to?  A walk, a book, a shopping trip, coffee with a friend, engaging in a hobby, taking a much-needed nap. It’s time for a break. God insists upon it. 

[Kristin vanEyk lives in Kentwood, MI where she attends Encounter Church with her husband Dirk, and two kids, Lily and Colin. Kristin teaches high school English and otherwise passes the time reading, writing, running, and enjoying all that Michigan's West Coast has to offer.]