All I want is a couple days off

Taking a break

How do you go with taking a break?

Sometimes it feels like the world is divided into two groups: those who don’t know how to rest and those who don’t know how to work.

For many of us who find ourselves in the latter group we have become quite skilled at rationalising why it is that we need to work as hard as we do.

The biblical principal of Sabbath has come to mean lots of things to lots of people but it turns out to be quite simple.

Author of ‘the Message’, Eugene Peterson says in his book ‘Christ plays in 10,000 places’:

The most striking thing about keeping the Sabbath is that it begins by not doing anything. The Hebrew word shabbat, which we take over into our language untranslated, simply means, “Quit… Stop… Take a break.”

As such, it has no religious or spiritual content: Whatever you are doing, stop it… Whatever you are saying, shut up… Sit down and take a look around you… Don’t do anything… Don’t say anything…Fold your hands… Take a deep breath.”

God invented the Sabbath because he knew that some of us would get delusions of grandeur.. thinking that somehow the world would stop if we stopped.

The bible is fairly clear about the significance of a day off. Here is just a sample of verses:

Ex 20:8-10 8 “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates.

Ex 34:21 21 “Six days you shall labor, but on the seventh day you shall rest; even during the plowing season and harvest you must rest.

Dt 5:12-14 12 “Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the LORD your God has commanded you. 13 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 14 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor the alien within your gates, so that your manservant and maidservant may rest, as you do.

Isa 56:2 2 Blessed is the man who does this, the man who holds it fast, who keeps the Sabbath without desecrating it, and keeps his hand from doing any evil.”

So God wanted us to be able to take a day off.. in fact he wanted more than that: One year in seven was to be a rest year!

As if that wasn’t enough, throughout the year there were a range of festivals designed to tear a person away from their work long enough to realise the world doesn’t stop when they stop work.

I’ve been thinking a bit about rest over the past few days because we are heading off for a holiday on Tuesday. It has been a very big year and there is something very nice about the idea of “time off”.

I wonder though, if we actually  lived our lives after the pattern God laid out, whether we would have as many workaholics in the world?

There is something nice about knowing that God is always at work, and because of that, I don’t need to be!