How and why to rest on the Sabbath
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Corrie Ten Boom once said, “If the devil can’t make us bad, he’ll make us busy.” This quote reflects our current culture: in college and beyond, we have forgotten how to rest.
We normalize drinking at least one cup of coffee every day and getting far less than seven hours of sleep every night, so we can do more, stretching our time over an overflowing list of activities. These obligations shift our work-load from five days a week to seven.
While we may pray on Sundays, we often spend the rest of them studying. We lose track of the fact that Sunday should be a day of rest.
Christians should, of course, rest on Sunday because God commanded it–but even knowing this, we can trivialize its importance. This commandment wasn’t one of the hundreds of rules of the Old Covenant, nor was it a side note in a sermon. God found the Sabbath important enough to include it in the eternal Ten Commandments.
While studying can fall under necessary servile work or a labor of love, the spirit of the Sabbath still applies – Sunday should be, as much as possible, a time of doing things apart from the necessary.
Even withholding religion, man isn’t meant to always work. In “The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry,” John Mark Comer writes that studies consistently show no correlation between hurry and productivity. Once we hit a certain amount of hours working, our productivity actually goes down.
Human nature is consistent in this respect. Exercising strengthens us, but muscles actually grow during rest. Similarly, when we work nonstop, we inevitably burn out. But when we take a day off, we recharge, and our work becomes better in the long run.
However, a day of rest, ironically, requires some work. Plenty of obstacles prevent us from Sabbath-keeping, such as lack of motivation. We often can’t get the willpower to work ahead, and can only study under the pressure of Sunday.
There are ways to conquer this, such as the much-lauded OptimalWork, but even if you can’t completely overcome procrastination, you can still keep a day of rest. One way to do this is to follow the traditional Jewish day’s cycle and rest from Saturday evening to Sunday evening, taking the latter evening to catch up on school. This gives you the ability to relax without guilt, knowing you’ve set aside time to work later.
A perhaps more common objection to taking off work on Sunday is that we just don’t have time. But the solution to an overcrowded life is not to have more time in the day, it’s to have less things crowding it.
You may need to cut out some social media, step back from a few clubs, or figure out how to work more productively. Most of us have at least a few amendable areas that drain away our time. The bottom line is, if you’re too busy to enjoy life as God commanded, then you’re too busy.
Often, however, after setting aside time, we realize we don’t know how to rest properly. When I first started Sabbath-keeping, I ended up scrolling online for hours because it was easy and I had forgotten how to really relax. Sunday is for doing what really brings you joy,not for sitting on your couch and staring at screens.
Comer proposes this question for Sabbath-keeping: “What could I do for twenty-four hours that would fill my soul with a deep, throbbing joy?” To take a day of leisure is to do what enlivens you. That could be taking a walk, going running, porch-sitting with friends, laying in a hammock, calling home, reading a book just for fun or anything else that gives you life.
We all ran around outside as kids. There’s no reason we can’t do it again. Find the things that make you alive again, and do them on Sunday.
God wants us to delight in his world, and we can’t do so when we never slow down and take it in. Once we learn to truly be still, we realize how starved we always are for rest. Beyond God’s command to keep the Sabbath and the way it aids your productivity, taking time to do what you love will slow you down, recreate you and remind you how beautiful life truly is.
Bio: Mary Cavanna is a sophomore English major.