Sabbath

I don't know if God works this way with other people, but when He wants to teach me something, He repeats it. Repeatedly.

I suddenly find myself faced with the same truth or idea over and over again. The thought may be presented in different contexts and come from different sources. But each one has the same resonance in my heart. It's as if God is saying,"Consider this. Measure yourself against this. Be prepared to change."

Almost two years ago, I read a short article in Discipleship Journal magazine that included the following Q&A with Eugene Peterson:

DJ: What spiritual practice has most shaped your walk with God?

Eugene: Keeping a weekly Sabbath -- a day my wife and I define as "praying and laying." A day we don't do anything that has to be done.

When we realized that the command to keep a Sabbath is one of the most repeated in Scripture and yet the most ignored in our culture, we had to readjust radically the way we were living. No other decision has made as much difference to our lives across the board. It has impacted our marriage, children, church life, friendships, writing ... the works.

Sabbath-keeping shifted our attention from what we were doing for God to what God was doing for us. Our work became subsumed in His.

The keeping of a modern-day Sabbath is a fairly new idea in most Christian circles. Certainly, it's not a practice I grew up with, and I grew up deep within the Evangelical subculture. (My proof: I get 98.5% of the jokes on Stuff Christians Like. Jon is my people.) So when I heard Eugene Peterson credit Sabbath-keeping as the number one spiritual practice to impact his faith, I sat up and took notice.

Since that time, I've done a fair amount of research on the Sabbath. I know its history, its traditions, its benefits and dangers. Many people I know and respect practice the idea of Sabbath in different ways, and there's both freedom and beauty in that.

But yet today, two years later, I still struggle with integrating Sabbath into my daily, wife-mother-cooker-cleaner life. As most Moms know, there are no days off in this business. And I'm OK with that; really, I am. I love my life, and I know it won't always be this way. But right now, I can't imagine taking a whole day to "pray and lay." I love the concept. But I don't know how to fit it into my practical, everyday existence.

I have some thoughts about this, which I'll share later in the week. But for now, I'd like to open it up for discussion. Do you practice a Sabbath and/or know someone who does? (Link to Wiki there, if you have no idea what I'm talking about.) If so, what does it look like? If not, why not?