My first introduction to practicing the Sabbath during college was a walk through the canyon at George Fox University with one of my honors peer advisors. As we walked through the fall foliage, she explained to me her new conviction of taking Sunday, or part of Sunday, off from homework to rest. As a hectically busy student, the idea was appealing to me, but crazy. A day off? When was I supposed to get anything done?
In our day and age, it’s easy to be too busy and fill all our free time with social media or YouTube. We need peace in our lives in order to thrive, because our real lives aren’t meant to be exciting all the time, and we need down time to figure out how to rest. We were created to rest in God’s presence and even required to have a Sabbath day, a day of rest.
These days practicing the Sabbath isn’t a Christian requirement, since we are no longer bound to the law. However, its special place in the Bible indicates its importance to life.
Practicing the Sabbath isn’t a health guru, mega influencer, gym junky checkbox to be one step closer to “millionaire habits” (unless you wake up at 5 am and take a cold shower on your Sabbath). The Sabbath is a way of life, a way of directing us back to God on a clockwork rhythm. Jesus says he is “lord of the Sabbath,” showing us that we are not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath is made for us.
It’s hard to rest when stressed, anxious, or depressed. I used to get by “surviving” on 4-6 hours of sleep, working on homework often far into the wee hours, and it wasn’t a habit easily lost. My husband has a lot to do with my now relaxed life: he provided me with a sense of stability and comfort for the last two years of my life, something that had been absent for four years before that.
My circumstances aren’t unusual; we all need someone providing us with a sense of stability. That does not mean that everyone needs to be married (or that marriage is a “cure” for being unstable), but that as human creatures, we aren’t meant to live in a state of constant uncertainty. God knows this, and has provided us with the certainty of his presence, and the certainty that he will rescue us from our sins. In Isaiah chapter 1 verse 18-19, the Lord says:
““Come now, let us reason[a] together…
though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red like crimson,
they shall become like wool.””
Looking back, I wish that I could have learned how to balance busyness and rest earlier, but struggling has made me learn how to keep getting back up after failing. Most things in life are hard, and the habits and characteristics we wish to learn often require lots and lots of failure before they become second nature.
Practicing the Sabbath is similar. It requires six days of harder work to finish everything in six days instead of seven, or even just enough work to set aside one evening. Either way, it should be the same night every week, because one important aspect of the Sabbath is its rhythm. Because it was created for us and not vice versa, the emphasis on the timing of the Sabbath tells us that we need regular and consistent rest. Actually, we need most things to be regular and consistent. That’s why being a college student is so hard, after all. Almost everything about our lives changes during the years spent studying and thinking about our life vocation.
Honestly, I still find making time for a Sabbath day difficult, but I’m learning how to live with rest and responsibility in mind, so I finish homework before it’s due and have time to spend with my husband and with God.