Sabbath

2019 was the year I studied Sabbath.  

It began in January with Jen Wilkin’s Better, an in-depth dissection of Hebrews.  Her book held me upside down and shook me like a snow globe, so that all my inner parts swirled and whirled about and still haven’t quite settled. 

That led me to Priscilla Shirer’s power-packed study, Breathe: Making Room for Sabbath, and to Shauna Niequist’s Present Over Perfect.  These, and others, fed me this past year like the ravens fed Elijah in the wilderness.  They reached out through the pages and kept me company, offered their “grace and nourishment” (Shauna’s words), and taught me.

Sabbath, I learned, is so much more than a day off from work.  It is a rhythm for life as old as creation,  practiced by God Himself.  It was God’s commandment for His people, an act of obedience, a prerequisite to blessing.  He called it a gift and a celebration; and with it He delivered them from slavery to freedom.  It is an Old Testament ritual embodied and fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ.

Sabbath is also worship.  It is a love note to the Lord: a symbol of commitment, a renewal of vows.  It is a preventative against idolatry and excess, against focusing too much on works.  It is a boundary line we erect around the praise-worthy and the sacred, one that keeps the good in and the bad out.  It is a confession, both outwardly and inwardly, that God is All.  

It gathers to the altar all the wayward parts of ourselves, binds them there and sets a fire.  It requires discipline and intentionality, humility and faith.  It is all at once release, return, and rest.  As Jen Pollock Michel wrote in “A Story Called Rest”:

“…the world’s beginning introduces the scandalous idea of divine work for the purpose of human flourishing– a world in which true rest is possible because Someone Else is awake.”    

True rest, because God is faithfully awake.

After a year’s study, I’ve distilled it down to this: Sabbath is God’s invitation to us to be kids again.  To play, to ask for help, to trust.  To feel fully cared for and carefree.    To enjoy a soul-deep break from our burdens, letting our Father have all our weight so we can both finish the race and notice the beauty all around us as we go.

We won’t get very far with Sabbath if we don’t begin with the belief that He is a very good, trustworthy Father. We also won’t get very far with Sabbath if we think that what we do has any affect on His love for us. We don’t win over His affection with our accomplishments. And yet, as Shauna Niequist put it: we tend to do for Jesus, instead of being with Jesus. 

To truly be with Jesus requires a slower pace.  It is seeing and being fully seen.  It is intimacy.   It is hard.  

As with every year’s end, I find myself looking back.  I remember those people who hurt me, and those whom I’ve hurt.  Each unmet expectation alongside the answered prayers.  All the stuff I want to explain to Him, or have Him explain to me.  But Sabbath is also the recognition that God is big enough for all the ships that won’t come in.  All the closure, answers, and apologies, that lie scattered and lost at the bottom of the deep.  He’s big enough to handle regret over our past and anxiety over our future so that we can be here– in this present moment right now– walking through the questions of our unfinished stories, with Jesus.  

Putting Sabbath into practice is hard for me, but I’m learning.  I’m trying to take time to just sit quietly at His feet without getting up to accomplish something.  I’m trying to give my family all of me, not the me that’s also straightening up around the living room with one thought somewhere else.  And I’m trying to take all the uncomfortable stuff that’s hard– the wrongs I want to right by forcing others to listen or change or understand– and to let Him have that, too.  In all its mess.  To tell Him where it hurts and why it sucks, and to let Him be the Dad so I can get back to being the kid.  So I can have a life of outrageous dreams, wild laughter, honest relationships, and deep, restorative sleep.  

I have a playlist of my favorite holiday music and one of my most loved songs is Casting Crowns’ I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day. It says: “Then rang the bells more loud and deep, God is not dead nor does He sleep. The wrong shall fail the right prevail, with peace on earth, goodwill to men.”

Peace on earth. Goodwill to men. THAT is the heart of God. That is the essence of Sabbath. I pray it’s not just my 2019, but my 2020, too. And not just mine, but yours.