Rhythms of Rest: Finding the Spirit of Sabbath in a Busy World

by Shelly Miller

Sabbath is a long period of stillness and quiet to read, pray, and nap. If my current life situation doesn’t afford that lavish gift, then I am exempt from Sabbath. Sabbath is only possible after I get everything done. Sabbath is only for those who are spiritually mature. Sabbath can only be observed on Sunday. And because I have Sunday responsibilities, Sabbath is impossible for me. Sabbath is something I do in order to become more productive. Can you identify with some of these myths?

What works for me is scheduling time. I look for half days or entire days when I can unplug and rest and then guard that scheduled day by being firm about observing Sabbath. When I waffle by making exceptions, it’s typically another two months before it happens again. When there is Sabbath rest in my life, I find ministry springs forth from a spiritual place rather than a frantic, flesh-driven place. When I am not incorporating Sabbath, it is oh-so-easy to fall into people-pleasing and doing things for prideful or selfish motives rather than using spiritual discernment and seeking the Holy Spirit. Sabbath seems to keep things much more balanced regarding commitments and decisions in ministry—and life in general. This invariably even spills over into my marriage! Sabbath is an essential tool for “centering” in my life.

Within the context of rhythms for our busy workaday lives, if we abuse time by neglecting to incorporate Sabbath into our week, eventually what is natural becomes burdensome, uncomfortable, disrupted. Over time, a lack of rest leads to a wilting capacity. What begins as a life calling, exploring uncharted destinations filled with adventure and vistas of influence, eventually folds in on itself as we encounter the inevitable storms of life. Has it been a while since you’ve exhaled?

Resistance is an outcome of self-reliance. And self-reliance almost always leads to self-doubt. And most all self-doubt is rooted in comparison, that fear of insignificance that petrifies.

In the same way Moses wrestled with God’s belief in his gifts, the turning point in making Sabbath a rhythm is determined by what you do with resistance. Will you let fear of the unknown and the need for certainty keep you from rest? Or will you push past “self” vying for first place and trust him with your time, regardless of the outcome?

Why are you unwilling to risk stopping for rest? Why do you lack faith in this commandment? What could you be telling yourself that keeps you resistant toward Sabbath? What are you afraid you might hear if you stop?

Many with ongoing Sunday commitments make rest a priority on another day of the week. And this is different from a day off for leisure activity. Sabbath is a time with heightened awareness of God’s nearness, his presence with you. An expectancy and longing for intimacy in relationship like a couple who has been separated anticipating reunion. The key to successful rest periods is preparing for him to come. Walk toward Sabbath instead of away from it. Make meal plans, shop, and run errands ahead of time and find yourself anticipating the joy of an extended period sans household duties.

From ministry leaders in the Sabbath Society there comes a sacred echo from intentional weekly rest.6 Ministry springing forth from a place of peace fuels a heightened awareness of God’s presence with us. A renewal of sensitivity to the Holy Spirit informs leadership decisions with great results. Without Sabbath, it is easier to fall into people-pleasing and making decisions based on selfish motives, not only in volunteerism and ministry vocation but also in core relationships.

Sabbath as a rhythm of life changes the questions of life from how to who. Sabbath is a weekly reminder that God cares more about who you are than what you do.

If we do not allow for a rhythm of rest in our overly busy lives, illness becomes our Sabbath—our pneumonia, our cancer, our heart attack, our accidents create Sabbath for us. Wayne Muller, Sabbath

I’m no longer afraid of tripping on the oversized pant legs of my indecision in moments of adversity. Faith stood the test in surrender. I met God on his terms, not my own.

There are two kinds of brokenness—voluntary and involuntary. Alan Nelson describes voluntary brokenness as the kind that allows God to do whatever he wants with us. Involuntary brokenness, on the other hand, comes as the uninvited guest of difficulty—divorce, job loss, death, chronic illness, the trauma of a car accident: You can choose one of three responses when involuntary brokenness comes your way. You can rebel and grow bitter. You can gradually give in under constant nagging and increased pressure. Or you can respond positively to it and mature. In essence, you can go through it, or you can grow through it. But when we go through difficult issues without developing an awareness of our inadequacies and God’s love for us, we become broken in the wrong places.3 Nelson goes on to describe people broken in the wrong places as bitter, cynical, brittle, angry, and hateful; a shell of our former selves in old age. In essence, he is describing a person void of rest, but he is also describing someone who interprets long waiting seasons wrongly.

What if we translated a forced Sabbath—that point of relentless discomfort that comes with difficulty—as an opportunity to deepen intimacy with Jesus?

“I thought about a friend whose husband had cancer and was walled up emotionally with fear. He didn’t talk to her throughout the last days of his life. It was a wonderful lesson for me (painful for her, of course) about how fear destroys our essence. Your words, ‘A healing of the body is not always a healing of the soul,’ are profound and true.

“Silence is the soul’s oxygen.”

moment. Constance reveals she is broken in the right places. She admits she doesn’t have rest all figured out, but she is pressing in—learning, listening, abiding, believing God is the source of inner peace.

Pausing for prayerful listening, even for just a few minutes, brings everything that is important back into focus. We need whitespace for hearing the truth more clearly.

Daniel Gross finds, In recent years researchers have highlighted the peculiar power of silence to calm our bodies, turn up the volume on our inner thoughts, and attune our connection to the world. Their findings begin where we might expect: with noise. The word noise comes from a Latin root meaning either “queasiness or pain.”

Recent neuroscience research reveals that “freedom from noise and goal-directed tasks, it appears, unites the quiet without and within, allowing our conscious workspace to do its thing, to weave ourselves into the world, to discover where we fit in. That’s the power of silence.”

Life is big like God’s kingdom. Relationship is small town with Jesus. He knows your name and what you will say before you utter it. His couch is always available and bread never runs out, no matter the circumstance. A forced Sabbath can be an unexpected grace—a small portal of escape when life feels big, overwhelming, and interrupted.

The seventh day remains holy regardless of where we find ourselves, regardless of feelings about time and space. Sabbath remains holy and set apart because he is holy, different, other than.

But Noah, it says in Genesis, was a righteous man, the only blameless person living on earth at the time. He walked in close fellowship with God (Genesis 6:9). In Hebrew, Noah means rest, comfort, repose. The only blameless person on the earth was also the man whose name is identified with rest. Do you grasp the significance? On the sixth day, the day before God rested from all that he created, God saw all that he had made, and it was very good (1:31). Yet only one was blameless. “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them” (1:27). Noah was the spitting image of his Father, and yet he was the only kid who desired relationship.

When we build a rhythm of rest, it is a sign of hope for a weary world.

Close fellowship despite living in a busy world tainted by darkness results in a Sabbath heart. God is asking us to build an ark, a safe harbor of rest constructed with hope, a bold proclamation, saving those who are perishing in their own strength.

God gives all of us Sabbath as a sign of covenant between us, a reminder that He is Lord of who we are and all that we possess. Sabbath is love written large, declaring God is good; he remembers the promises between us. I want to be like Noah. One walking against popular norms in our culture for the sake of intimate union, trusting a rainbow will appear on the horizon.

One of the things I have learned during the past ten or eleven weeks is that I matter, tremendously. I am worth setting aside everything else for the insane workload, the demands of family members with to-do lists needing my attention, housework, cooking—everything that was not accomplished during the week. Sabbath was doable when I had the time to plan for it, to ready myself and my household. But Sabbath comes, ready or not. It arrives like an old friend quietly knocking on the door, asking if you’d like to come out and play for the day, and my childlike response each week has been a resounding yes! I not only need the break and the rest, but my soul demands it. I am worth my time. My relationships with God and others are far better off if I am committed to meeting my own needs. Sabbath allows for this. The God and Creator of the universe deems me worthy of rest, and I relish in it.

But how much of our faith journey is firsthand experience and not just what we know about him? Information helps us to know about God, but Sabbath allows us to encounter him.

I’m finally learning that true rest is only accessible through faith in Christ. Not exercise, worship, Bible reading, meditation, service, or loving others. There is no rest in being useless when you already feel worthless. It feels much safer to lean on self-righteousness than dare to humble myself and believe again. This is not about doing rest; this is about being loved for doing nothing! Saying no to obligation and yes to Sabbath is my favorite thing.

“Rwandans have time and Americans have clocks.” This couldn’t be a more convicting yet accurate statement. Take twelve Americans on the trip of their lifetime, and the first question they ask? “What are we going to be doing today?” In order for a mission trip to be worth the investment of time and resources, mission boards, financial supporters, and missionaries on the ground want to see measurable outcomes. But what if God’s highest expectation in the journey to a needy culture is engaging the sacrament of presence, being with people because we love them? Is our time with people valuable even if the time can’t be calculated into measured outcomes? According to my friend Archbishop Emmanuel Kolini, our undivided attention is the most precious resource we can give people in his country.

People in third-world countries teach those of us in the West that our poverty isn’t in tangible assets but in our inability to practice pausing. We know we need Sabbath, but we don’t know how to make Sabbath a reality. “Wasting time” in order to be present isn’t justifiable, so we struggle with how to find usefulness.

Selah means “pause and think about that.”

In some translations of the Bible, Selah is defined as “stop and listen” or “to measure or weigh what is being said.”

Silence changes the profane to sacred. Silence is equated with reverence and awe, something otherworldly and beyond our control. Silence disrobes busyness and makes it holy. Walk into an empty church, a funeral home, or the hospital room of a sick person. Sabbath is silence—a faint whisper breaking into a loud and busy world.

A state of inner solitude doesn’t depend on the outside world, the reception of others, or circumstance, and it is most often contagious to those who find anxiety and emotional upheaval the norm of life. The more we experience the work of solitude within us, we begin to identify the rested from the restless, the discontented from the contented, the broken from the whole; we begin to decipher failure, missteps, and successes through a heart aching for eternity.

In Playdates with God, Laura Boggess writes, “It’s no accident that the word question contains the word quest. When was the last time I gave curiosity free rein? When did I last let myself get lost in wondering, let exploration lead instead of a goal? When we let go of preferred outcomes—from striving for a certain goal—our imagination is opened up and the years are peeled away, freeing us to wonder.”

God was testing my relationship to him. He was waiting to see if my faith was built with roots in him or what I knew about him. And I believe he waits in that same posture when we approach Sabbath. Is Sabbath something we do to build deep roots in him or is it what we know about him?

Henri Nouwen instructs, “Instead of running away from our loneliness and trying to forget or deny it, we have to protect it and turn it into a fruitful solitude. To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.”

I can’t remember the last time I played without equating the time with what I could get out of it. Or delighted in a run, bike ride, or a swim not to log miles and burn calories but because I found pleasure in the pursuit. What about social media? When was the last time you took a photo without thinking about sharing what you experienced with the masses? Or created something beautiful without needing a response from your friends on Facebook? Enjoyed a respite with your family without sharing the everyday account of how the time away was a blessing? When was the last time you engaged in something for the sheer joy of being with God?

Joy that comes from playfulness wasn’t common in my household growing up. As the child of an alcoholic, the natural emotion of joy was lost in the fear of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Moments of fun almost always included cloud cover on my emotions as a way of avoiding what I assumed would be inevitable disappointment. I am in a slow recovery process with what Brené Brown coins in her book Daring Greatly as foreboding joy.13 When everything is going well, my emotions tell me (wrongly) that disaster is coming, so I brace myself for the worst. Instead of taking my chances with a zip line, I imagine myself as a quadriplegic and my family shackled with caretaking. Once I opted out of a hula dancing event hosted at my best friend’s fortieth birthday celebration, hiding behind my camera to capture the memory instead of participating. A physical reaction of anxiety made my chest heavy and legs wobble when I thought about making a fool of myself dancing in a hula skirt in front of girlfriends.

Foreboding joy is a fast-forward through the details, rehearsing what we assume might happen when we feel vulnerable. And usually we imagine the worst. This kind of fear is what makes play terrifying. Brown says, “When we spend our lives (knowingly or unknowingly) pushing away vulnerability, we can’t hold space open for the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure of joy.”14...

Sometimes when I think I’m waiting on God I wonder if he’s actually waiting on me. Emily Freeman, Simply Tuesday

Brené Brown writes, “Another example of how our need for certainty sabotages our intuition is when we ignore our gut’s warning to slow down, gather more information, or reality check our expectations.”

Can I encourage you to let go and fill up with the peace of God’s goodness? He’s patiently waiting for you to slow down so he can express his love for you.

God continues to redeem my time when I offer it back to him. Trust is a big part of Sabbath-keeping. Do you trust me? It’s the question I hear him ask me every Saturday as the sun slowly descends over work left undone.

to observe Sabbath properly, codes of behavior and law must be followed in order to make the practice legitimate, taking what God intended as a freedom and turning it into a spiritual hoop for justification. When the goal is controlling people and circumstances, anything can become an idol replacing God’s sovereignty, even my need for certainty. Considering context in terms of how you rest keeps Sabbath rhythms flexible.

“I’m learning that sometimes an activity is restful, and at other times it becomes work. For instance, baking cookies with my granddaughter versus having to bake cookies for an event. However, laundry rarely makes the restful category!”

Ahyana knows Sabbath is about God, but only through allowing herself to trust others, did she learn that Sabbath is being with God. Rest and love are connected: For me, resting, releasing, and Sabbath-keeping has been intimately linked with trust. The more my trust grows, the more I can release and rest. I know God has my back. In the context of healthy relationships with other believers and building a support network, I have learned to release and surrender to the God of the Sabbath.

When we feel unloved, we tend to push, hurry, and hustle. When we feel loved with nothing to prove, we enter rest more easily. In Sabbath, we become our truest self. In the same way leaves let go of branches, we understand God’s intent in the fourth commandment by letting go of expectations; we allow the process of transition to shape a Sabbath heart and birth a new season. He gives hints he is near during the uncomfortable unknowns in transitions, but often we assume the hints are random and inconsequential—the

My heart is starting to trust more deeply. The hardest part about Sabbath for me is that a lot of the time, when I try to rest in God, I hear nothing but crickets. I know the block in my heart is because he wants me to learn that he really does love me. It’s so much easier to stay busy on Sabbath than face the fear that I may only hear crickets. But after realizing this week that God really does see and hear me, I know he loves me and now I can rest.

I’m learning that when we say yes to God and let go of the need for certainty, that doesn’t mean he’ll grant our every wish or provide rescue with instant security. God cares more about our transformation into his image than immediate relief. His plans are good and often broader than we imagine. Over time, this truth transforms my addiction to certainty into a craving for the intimacy I experience with Jesus on Sabbath. One day of rest, which I initially interpreted as a sacrifice, becomes the day to remember how deeply I am loved.