If you have grown up in Christian culture and if you are working for a Christian organization, I’m sure you have heard about the importance of Sabbath. And if you are anything like me, you are thinking, “cool yeah, rest is important, but what the heck is Sabbath really?!”. Maybe you already know what Sabbath is and this blog won’t be helpful at all, but for anyone who is like me, this is what I have discovered.
Now that I have been overseas for almost 6 months, I am starting to understand the importance of rest and Sabbath. Ex-missionaries, your organization, your church, will warn about burnout but no one gives you a guidebook on how to Sabbath or what that even means. The past few weeks I have been diving deep into the history of Sabbath and what it meant to the Jewish people as well as how they understood it as something from God. I want to know the history and religious implications of Sabbath to better understand how I can Sabbath in a way that gives my mind and body rest, but more importantly gives me rest deep in my soul.
I will give a cop-out answer here and say that Sabbath is different for everyone. No one will Sabbath the same because everyone’s souls need something different. I have been reading a book called “The Sabbath” by Abraham Joshua Heschel, a rabbi and Jewish theologian. He says that, “the Sabbath is the presence of God in the world, open to the soul of man”. He argues that the Sabbath is a day unlike any other day because God has deemed it holy. “The Sabbath is no time for personal anxiety or care, for any activity that might dampen the spirit of joy… It is a day for praise, not a day for petitions…For the Sabbath is a day of harmony and peace, peace between man and man, peace within man, and peace with all things.”.
God created and sanctified the Sabbath; this means that it must be important. I’m still trying to figure out what it looks like to Sabbath for me personally, but I now have a greater understanding of the eternal, beautiful, holiness that is the Sabbath. I know that to Sabbath well, I need to do things that give me deep-seeded joy. That can look different on different Sabbaths. Some Sabbaths I need to just sit and read and worship God. Other days I need to be in community with other Believers. My Sabbath will continue to transform and change, but the one consistency is the holy, sacredness of this one day that separates me from my identity in work and allows me presence in the Divine.