In September I wrote a post about building a habit of rest. I shared about our annual tradition of attending camp meeting. I stated that I'd write a second part to the post, and some of you have reminded me that I never wrote the second post.
As a reminder, here are the five steps I shared on building a habit of rest as they applied to our August camp meeting.
How to Build a Habit of Rest
1. Choose a busy time of year.
(For most of us, that is anytime! Rest must not wait for us to not be busy. It needs to be planned and fought for. Even on crazy August days.)
2. Ignore your work, and take time to rest and worship.
(For a mom with children, work will always be there, but the opportunity to spend time with your family may not.)
3. Repeat the next year.
(There are seasons that you need to adapt or change your routines. So don't be stuck on doing it only one way. But also, don't give up striving for rest.)
4. And repeat the year after, until it becomes a habit or routine.
(Building a habit isn't complicated. It just requires consistency. But consistency is hard when you are tired.)
5. To reinforce the routine, include your little people.
(They are great at giving accountability to do the things we want or need to do.)
But I know that most people don't have the opportunity to attend something like a camp meeting each year. Maybe they could find something similar to do with their family, but my situation with having a camp meeting nearby, that I attended as a child, that my children enjoy, and which works into our schedule of work and school is not a reality for most people. I'm sure there are ways that the basic idea could be adapted, and I'd love to hear your ideas, but most readers probably read that post and thought it out of grasp.
But as I sat by my campfire at camp meeting and thought about building a habit of rest, I thought of another routine that my parents had built into my life - resting one day each week.
Like most habits built in childhood, I didn't appreciate the routine of resting on Sunday for many years. I took it for granted and sometimes resented it. I grew up on a dairy farm, so it was impossible to stop all work on Sunday. Cows needed to be fed and milked twice a day regardless of the day of the week. But no extra work was done on Sunday, and often we did a bit extra on Saturday to make less work on Sunday.
I remember arguing with my mom on what constituted work. I was glad I didn't need to work in the garden on Sunday, but I enjoyed sewing, and thought I could sew on Sunday, but she said that was providing for our needs, even if it was an enjoyable hobby, and should be laid aside for one day. Now I'm glad for the model she gave me. No, there was nothing wrong with sewing on Sunday, but if I truly wanted to set aside a day and make it special, it would mean sacrificing some things I enjoyed.
I now know that Sundays aren't very restful for moms. Caring for children never stops. Meals need to be prepared every day. If we had guests on Sunday, which we often did, that required more work for Mom. But still Sundays were held special, with the rest of the week shaping the goal of resting on Sunday.
For my parents, church attendance on Sunday was expected. Even if we were traveling, they planned their schedule to be in church somewhere on Sunday. I had to be very sick to skip gathering with believers on Sunday (and every other time there was church during the week.)
As I got older and spent more time away from home, I realized how differently some families looked at Sunday. For some, Sundays were a day to shop and eat out - two things my parents avoided unless there was a dire emergency. I began to evaluate the habits I grew up with to decide what I wanted Sundays to look like for myself.
Jesus said that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. (Mark 2:27) I don't believe that we are required to keep the Old Testament Sabbath laws. But did God create the human body to need to rest one day a week? For our grandparents, resting one day a week was culturally expected. Stores closed, and it was socially unacceptable to mow your grass on Sunday. But we are now reaping the result of several decades without a cultural Sunday rest habit. Recently there seems to be a revival of having a day of rest. As burnout becomes more common (or maybe more often admitted), many people, even unbelievers, are promoting some kind of rest day each week for physical and mental health.
When I married Ed, he helped me think more about preparation for Sunday. He never wanted to be out late on Saturday night. Sometimes I wanted to finish up a project, maybe mop my kitchen floor, after the children were in bed on Saturday night, but he always said that anything not done by 9:00 Saturday night could be finished Monday. His opinion was that if he came into Sunday so exhausted that he couldn't stay awake during church and had to take a long nap on Sunday afternoon, then he needed to change how he spent his week. He encouraged me to keep meals very simple on Sunday, which meant sometimes we ate leftovers. If we had company on Sundays, he would suggest easy menus that could be made ahead and reminded me that I wasn't trying to impress. When Ed became a minister, he tried to work ahead on his sermon so he didn't have to stay up late or get up early to finish it.
All of these practices helped shape my expectations of a day of rest. We had some crazy years with many little people in our house. I often felt chronically tired, with getting up at night with babies. We spent many Sundays during those years going to a park after lunch to run off toddler energy, in hopes that everyone would nap on Sunday afternoon. We had full Sundays when Ed preached at another church, so we needed to get up early, and Sundays that we had afternoon AND evening plans, and I looked forward to Monday to recover. I was grateful for the routines we had built early in our marriage of preparing on Saturday, getting to bed earlier Saturday night, and keeping Sunday expectations as simple as possible.
One of the habits we built was to sit down sometime together on Sunday with our calendars and talk about the week ahead. Not only did it help us communicate our wishes and needs to each other, but it also helped set the tone for our week. I began to value Sundays as a way to recalibrate my focus. The combination of time of worship with God's people, the opportunity to set aside my normal tasks, and the communication with Ed about what was important, not only gave me physical rest but also mental clarity for the week ahead.
After Ed's death, Sundays were hard. I was glad that we had built in some Sunday routines. It was easy to carry on habits of church attendance and halting regular work, but Sundays felt drab without Ed and were a reminder of all I had lost. No longer was the day a celebration, an anticipated family time. It was hard to not dread Sunday. I had to fight to keep viewing Sundays as a gift.
This winter I've been thinking more about rest. I'm not sure if it is because I'm nearing fifty or the craziness of parenting young adults, but I've felt soul weary.
I've been reading what other authors say about the practice of a day of rest. In The Common Rule, Justin Whitmel Earley writes about his experience with a breakdown and how creating habits helped restore his mental and emotional health. One of those habits was keeping a Sabbath each week. He writes, "Practicing sabbath is supposed to make us feel like we can't get it all done because that is the way reality is. We can't do it all....Sabbath helps me see how small I am. When I don't see that, I'm always prone to misunderstand the reality of who is dependent on who. The belief that we sustain the world and God doesn't is at the core of our unrest. The violence of that belief shows up as scars on the heart and the body."
Kevin DeYoung, in Crazy Busy, says, "God gives us Sabbath as a gift; it's an island of get-to in a sea of have-to. He also offers us Sabbath as a test; it's an opportunity to trust God's work more than our own. When I go weeks without taking adequate time off, I may or may not be disobeying the fourth commandment, but I'm certainly too convinced of my own importance and more than a little foolish."
Many other authors are talking about the need to slow down one day a week and detach from normal life. Some studies even claim that people in religious groups who keep the Sabbath live longer.
Many Sunday afternoons, I've sat on my porch and felt immense gratitude for the habit of a day of rest that my parents gave me. I can look at a weedy flowerbed, a bulging laundry basket, a long grocery list, an unsewn dress, and cobwebs in the corner with no guilt. I can stretch out on the couch with a book, take a long walk, and play games with my children without feeling like a slacker.
A day of rest each week isn't a legalistic rule; it is a privilege. But as I considered what I believe about a day of rest, I noticed that even though there are some things I choose not to do on Sunday, such as laundry, cleaning, or shopping, my personality still desires to use my time productively. I want to get to the end of Sunday feeling like I have accomplished something. That might mean taking a walk, having a good conversation with a friend, reading a good book, journaling, or writing a card. But if I didn't do any of those things, I felt like I wasted the day. Even having friends over could become a checklist.
I realized I was obsessed with productivity when I stopped reading magazines because if I read books, I felt like I was accomplishing something when I added a book to my reading list. There wasn't anything wrong with choosing books over magazines, but there was something wrong with finding my value in what I accomplished.
This winter I decided to push against my desire for productivity and choose one of the most fruitless activities I could think of - putting together puzzles. I sorta like putting together puzzles and my youngest daughter enjoyed doing them with me, so we began keeping a puzzle on the coffee table. Often I listened to an audiobook while I put together the puzzle. (Yes, I'm still trying to multitask. Maybe I'll work on that next.) When the puzzle was finished, we'd look at it for a few minutes, then crush our hours of work and place the pieces back in the box and dump out a new puzzle.
Choosing to do a puzzle was my small step of resistance against my desire to find my worth in what I accomplish. I still have a long way to go. I can still turn a walk or reading into a competition, even just with myself. (Can I walk a mile in less time? Read more books than last year?) While a drive to improve, to do more, to run faster, can be good, for me it has been unhealthy. As I think of turning 50 this year, I know that I'm eventually going to face the fact that I cannot do more, faster, better, than I did last year, because physically I will be forced to slow down. If my value is only in my productivity, I'm going to fight against aging, which is a futile task.
For me, a day of rest is a reminder that God is my Creator and Redeemer. He made me with a body with limitations, and He did the work of salvation on the cross that I was helpless to do myself. Living and working for Him is a process of surrender, denial of self, and rest in His work. Sundays can help me refocus on what is important - loving God with my heart, sould, mind, and strength. The other six days can hopefully flow out of the peace of heart found on the day of rest.
I'm still figuring out what it means practically. I've experimented with staying offline on Sundays and think it would be a good habit. Even though I've chosen to not visit physical stores, it is easy to place an online order, but can I push against consumerism for one day each week? How can I remember that God is my provider, and He invites me to lay down my desires, needs, and wants at His feet? Can I accept this gift from Him?
Here is the list again, with a few adjustments for a weekly day of rest.
How to Build a Habit of Rest
1. Choose a busy time.
(For most of us, that is anytime! Rest must not wait for the work to all be done. Instead we choose to be filled first, then serve in the power of the Spirit.)
2. Ignore your work, and take time to rest and worship.
(For a mom with children, this is hard. So much depends on you. Maybe you will need to be creative in carving out time to rest and worship.)
3. Repeat the next week.
(There are seasons that you need to adapt or change your routines, such as when you have new babies. But don't give up striving for rest.)
4. And repeat the week after, until it becomes a habit or routine.
(Building a habit isn't complicated, but it requires consistency.)
5. To reinforce the routine, include your little people.
(Children are good at saying, "We always..." They give accountability to do the things we want or need to do.)
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I'd love to hear how you prioritize a day of rest. What is your biggest challenge? How does a day of rest help you shape the rest of the week?
