Sabbath: The Cure for Busyness, Pt. 2
You got out of bed this morning because you wanted something.
Maybe you wanted to go on a walk before it got unbearably hot outside. Maybe you wanted some time in the quiet before the chaos monsters—children—emerged from their lairs. Maybe you wanted to join with community, embracing space to recenter on Jesus. Maybe, like my wife, you wanted a nice, comforting cup of caffeine to start the day off right. (It’s amazing, I’m usually the first one out of bed, but as soon as I hit the button on the coffee grinder, I suddenly become a magician: Poof! Emily has appeared!)
The point is this: you did what you did today because of one thing: desire. We all wanted something, or a series of somethings, and those desires led us to make the radical choice to get out of bed and into the world. Desire, to some degree, motivates all that we do.
Which means desire is often a beautiful and good thing. Desire is what makes us passionate about our work; it’s what makes us caring parents or neighbors or friends; it’s what compels us to make good food and create good art and enjoy good company.
But if at any point desire becomes something we’re unable to control, if it takes the steering wheel of our lives in a way we can no longer channel rightly, we start to get into trouble. Because as good as desire can be, it is also one of those things that is never, ever satisfied. Desire is the root of human restlessness.
As far back as 1000 BC, the poet of Ecclesiastes put it this way: “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.” Fast forward to 1740, and you’ll find the philosopher David Hume echoing the same sentiment: “Desire alone, of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal.” And perhaps most memorably to many of us, one of our great modern poets put it quite simply back in 1965: “I can’t get no satisfaction.”
What every one of these voices is getting at is a fundamental component of our human nature: our desire is infinite. And because we are finite humans—inherently limited, with only one body, one mind, one heart, one job, one story, one life—we constantly feel a deep sense of longing for more. We have infinite desire but are unable to satisfy it with finite things, and so the human condition becomes perpetual turmoil. We become restless souls in restless bodies.
The Culture Built to Exploit That Restlessness
This restlessness often manifests as constant busyness: we rush and hurry, frantically attempting to fulfill infinite desire by accumulating or accomplishing more finite things. In fact, we’ve built an entire culture around this notion. America at its core is a culture obsessed with busily consuming in an attempt to satisfy its infinite desire.
Digital marketing experts say we see upwards of 4,000 advertisements per day, and all of them are designed to stoke the fire of desire in us. Right now, there are huge multinational corporations with access to our hearts through the small computers sitting in our pockets. There are teams of psychologists working around the clock with one goal: to convince us that infinite desire can be satisfied by one more finite thing. And they’re succeeding. According to a recent study, when adjusted for inflation, Americans today spend more than three times what they did 80 years ago on goods and services—more food, more clothes, more shoes, more square footage, more iPhones, more overpriced lattes. We are trained to be busy in an attempt to satisfy our deepest desires.
And if that message isn’t clear enough through marketing, it comes through loud and clear in our workplaces. America has trained us to believe that people who are busier with their work will find more satisfaction for their desires. Journalist Derek Thompson wrote about this for The Atlantic, calling our incessant career busyness “workism”:
Workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants... It is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose.
The result is a culture where more than 86% of men and 67% of women are overbusy, working more than forty hours a week. The Japanese have a word, karoshi—“death by overwork”—to help caution against this. Yet according to the International Labour Organization, Americans work 137 hours more per year than the Japanese, 260 more hours than the British, and 499 more hours than the French. Which might say more about the French than Americans, but you get the point.
And it isn’t working. Seventy percent of Americans are, in some way, unhappy or disengaged in the jobs where they overwork. As of 2019, the World Health Organization officially categorized “burnout” from work as a disease, and study after study has correlated overwork and overconsumption directly with anxiety and depression. Finite work and finite accumulation have not satisfied our infinite desire. As Thompson puts it at the end of his article: “Our desks were never meant to be our altars.”
Our Western world is physically and spiritually forming us into the belief that infinite desire can be satiated by constant busyness. And it’s ultimately destroying us. As A.J. Swoboda writes in Subversive Sabbath:
In bowing at these sacred altars of hyperactivity, our souls increasingly pant for meaning and value and truth as they wither away, exhausted, frazzled, displeased, ever on edge. The result is a hollow culture that, in Paul’s words, is “ever learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7). Our bodies wear ragged. Our spirits thirst. We have an inability to simply sit still and be.
The wear and tear of our constant busyness raises an important question: what do we do with our infinite desire? If constant rushing only leads to more restless and anxious pursuits, then what do we do with it?
Made for Another World
Here’s the good news: there’s an answer, and it comes from the person of Jesus. What Jesus and the Christian way communicate to us is that our experience of infinite desire exists because we were made to live in unity with God forever in his world, and nothing less than that will ever satisfy our souls. Christianity doesn’t say our desire is inherently bad. Rather, it’s good, but it needs to be rightly ordered so we don’t end up trying to satisfy infinite longing with finite things.
C.S. Lewis put this beautifully in Mere Christianity:
Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.
Augustine, the 5th-century North African theologian, said it even more simply in his Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.”
This is the second post in a short series I’m calling The Cure for Busyness, exploring how Jesus and Scripture both give voice to our human propensity toward busyness, and also prescribe practices in a life with God that serve as the cure. Today, I want to focus on one particular habit that for thousands of years has reminded followers of God that our deepest desires, our deepest satisfaction, come when we intentionally set aside time to rest from our busyness in loving unity with him. The practice is called Sabbath.
Here’s the text: Genesis 1:31–2:3.
31 God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
2 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all their multitude. 2 On the sixth day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. 3 So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.
The Rhythm of Work and Rest
The beginning of this passage is actually the end of a rather significant part of history: the creation of everything. God has been hard at work forming and ordering and creating all things, with great care and love. The repeated refrain from Genesis 1 is that all of this creation, from the smallest atom to the largest galaxy, is “good.” All parts work in harmony with all other parts; all of it is dignified and has a place; all of it participates in the flourishing of all other parts. And then, at the very end of the story, we hear that God rested.
God rested.
Yeah, but I’ve got three kids and I’m homeschooling and rushing them to sports and I’ve gotta make dinner...
God rested.
Yeah, but I’m a doer; that whole rest thing is nice, but I live for getting stuff done...
God rested.
Yeah, but my career is all about who works the hardest, and I have to compete for the promotion...
God rested.
And God chooses to do this after a more productive work week than any of us have ever put together. Sure, you may have knocked out a couple hundred emails, but God’s got the Himalayas and the sound of a flowing stream and the detail of the human body and the sun on his resume. He’s been hard at work doing all of that, and yet, even with all that on his plate, God says: That’s enough. This is good. I’ll rest.
The word translated “rest” here is the Hebrew word shabbat, where we get the word “sabbath.” It simply means “to stop” or “to cease.”
For many of us, even those raised in the church, this word and practice have been marginalized. I know that for me, Sabbath was often lumped into “Old Testament” territory and deemed no longer particularly relevant, except as a way of talking about the burden of the Old Testament law and how great it is to be free from such things in Jesus. Growing up I genuinely never heard a sermon unpacking Sabbath or its importance.
Which, in reflection, seems a bit odd, since Sabbath is pictured on page one of the Bible not as some burdensome law, but as an essential part of God’s creation. It’s also included in the Ten Commandments, listed right alongside things like not murdering, not stealing, not cheating on your spouse.
Let’s unpack Sabbath in three ways: what it is (and isn’t), what it does, and how we practice it.
What Sabbath Is (And Isn’t)
Delighting and settling in, not sitting on our hands. When we first read this Genesis passage, it can seem confusing, because we often equate rest directly with sleep. So we hear that God rested and think, Ahh, so God took a nap. But that’s not what this text is getting at. God isn’t fatigued and needing to catch up on eight hours of sleep. God isn’t twiddling his thumbs, bored or indifferent. The language here implies a sense of ceasing in order to enjoy and be present in the creation.
Scholar John Walton points out that the Hebrew here carries a sense of “stopping and settling in.” He writes:
“The linguistic information suggests that the seventh day is marked by God’s ceasing the work of the previous six days and by his settling into the stability of the cosmos he created, perhaps experiencing refreshment as he did so.”
The best illustration I can offer is mowing my lawn at home. In the winter, when we actually get some grass here in Phoenix, there’s a twofold process to working in the yard. First comes the actual labor: edging, weed pulling, pushing the heavy mower back and forth, emptying the grass canister a few times along the way. All of that work isn’t bad: it’s just the nature of maintaining the beauty of creation. But then, after a couple of hours of hard work, comes part two: I rest in the yard. I put away the tools, make myself a Old Fashioned—one big ice cube, two Luxardo cherries, an orange garnish—pull up an Adirondack chair, plop it down right in the middle of the yard, face the sunset with my dog Wally, and just sit and delight in the work of my hands. I run my bare feet through the grass. I take deep breaths. I toss a frisbee for Wally to chase. I take a sip and say out loud, “It is very good.”
That’s something like what God is doing in this passage: stopping and delighting in the goodness and beauty of the work of his hands.
So the first thing we learn about Sabbath is that it should spark delight in us. It’s not a religious ritual we check off a spiritual to-do list. It’s not just sitting inside doing nothing, and it’s not passive laziness. It is actively choosing to cease our busyness and delight in the work of our hands.
The completion of creation, not a break to get us ready to work again. Both Jewish and Christian scholars note something curious in the language here. Pay close attention: “On the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested.”
God finished the work that he had done. That makes it sound like God is still doing something on the seventh day, doesn’t it? The text is making clear that the seventh day isn’t empty: it’s full. God has done something new on the Sabbath: he has devoted this sacred period of time as an exclamation point of joy and peace and rest at the end of work.
The implication is groundbreaking. Genesis tells us that all the hard work of the previous six days was not finished, not complete, until it culminated in peace and rest. Joyful rest is woven into the fabric of creation, and no amount of our work or our lives is complete and healthy and whole without rest.
This flies right in the face of our busyness culture. For many of us, rest just means a convenient break that gets us back into work, a means to the end of working. But the Bible says the opposite: work is made meaningful because it culminates in good, peaceful rest.
Because humans, and creation in general, are not machines. We’re not made to go and go and go. Creation isn’t meant to be constantly cultivated, constantly producing. All things have been made to rest — it’s an essential part God has woven into the created order. We do violence against ourselves, against God, and against creation when we don’t rest.
Wayne Muller writes about this beautifully in Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives:
In the relentless busyness of modern life, we have lost the rhythm between work and rest. All life requires a rhythm of rest. There is a rhythm in our waking activity and the body’s need for sleep. There is a rhythm in the way day dissolves into night, and night into morning... In our bodies, the heart perceptibly rests after each life-giving beat; the lungs rest between the exhale and the inhale. We have lost this essential rhythm. Our culture invariably supposes that action and accomplishment are better than rest... And for want of rest, our lives are in danger.
The data backs this up. A recent Stanford study found that after 50 hours of work per week, productivity drops off a cliff, and someone working 70 hours per week shows no marked increase in productivity compared to someone working 50. A Microsoft experiment in Japan dropped employee work weeks from five days to four; productivity increased by more than 40%, and employee satisfaction by 92%. And decades of studies on Seventh-day Adventists — a Christian denomination that heavily emphasizes weekly Sabbath — show they live somewhere around 10 to 11 years longer than the average American. One researcher calculated the cumulative years a weekly Sabbath adds up to across a lifetime. The number: eleven. The hypothesis is that for every Sabbath you take, that day gets added back at the end of your life.
When we don’t practice Sabbath, we aren’t just rejecting a religious ritual, we are actively fighting God’s design for us and for our world. And the result is spiritually and physically devastating. As philosopher H.H. Farmer put it, “When you go against the grain of the universe, you get splinters.” It’s not an accident that the culture most obsessed with busyness and overwork is also the culture most plagued by anxiety, depression, doubt and disconnect from God, shallow relationships, burnout, loneliness, and hopelessness.
So that’s the second thing we learn: our lives and world are not complete without rest.
Worship, not a day off. Notice that the text says God “blessed” and “hallowed” the Sabbath day. It’s set apart as particularly important and special. This is the first time the word “holy” is used in the Bible, and it’s noteworthy that it describes a time, not a space.
In the ancient Near East, gods were understood to inhabit physical spaces. If you wanted to experience or worship a god, you’d have to go to a holy space: a temple, a pyramid, a mountain, a shrine. But this text is saying that the God of the Bible can be experienced in any space, through devoted time. Because this God is the one true and ultimate Creator, he is not bound or contained within specific holy spaces. Rather, the entire universe is God’s temple, and Sabbath is a crucial and specific way we experience unity with him. Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose book on the Sabbath is seminal, put it this way: “The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals.”
To experience unity with God, you don’t need to make a pilgrimage, and you don’t need your feet in one specific holy space. You can simply stop your busyness, cease your doing, and experience the presence of God through devoted time in Sabbath. The day is a reminder that you can know and love God anywhere, simply by orienting your time toward him.
Practically, this means Sabbath is a time set apart for worship of and communion with God, not just a day off work. It’s not just catching up on errands, binge-watching a show, getting ahead on emails, or spending six hours on a video game. None of those things are inherently bad, but the point of the Sabbath day is not only to not work: it’s to delight in the presence and love and care of God. It’s to come awake to his love again after a week in which we often forget it; to spend time in wonder and gratitude at the beauty of the life God has given us; to deeply enjoy his presence. As Eugene Peterson put it, it’s to “pray and play.”
And to be clear: this doesn’t mean sitting around singing worship songs all day. Worship of God is expansive: it’s often found right in the middle of our passions and joys, not just in singing. So worship in Sabbath includes good meals and drinks, fun with family and close friends, leisurely bike rides, a good nap, even a game of pickleball. The point of Sabbath is that we delight in the gifts of creation and direct our attention in gratitude and joy and worship toward the giver of those gifts. We invite God into whatever we’re doing.
So that’s what Sabbath is: delighting and settling in, not sitting on our hands; the completion of creation, not just a break to get us back into work; worship, not just a day off.
And when we start practicing this regularly, it begins to transform us in a few ways.
What Sabbath Does
It resists the tyranny of busyness. As the story of the Bible continues, we learn of a people group God calls to be his partners in bringing life and flourishing to the world: the nation of Israel. Not long into the story, they become enslaved to the ancient empire of Egypt, burdened not only by the dehumanization of slavery but also by unfair working loads and conditions. Quite literally, they are burdened by busyness, and they cry out to God to deliver them.
God hears their cry and miraculously leads them out of slavery into liberation and freedom. And then, once they’re free, God immediately emphasizes the importance of creating rhythms of rest in their new community, so they can become vehicles of redemption and restoration to the world. They are to Sabbath once every seven days. But the rest goes further: they celebrate seven festivals throughout the year, each orienting them toward God. Every seven years, they liberate slaves and let the land rest from farming for an entire year. And every 49th year—seven times seven—is the Year of Jubilee, when anyone who had lost land or gone into debt was forgiven and everything restored.
The reason given for all this? The grace of God brought them out of the land of Egypt so they wouldn’t be slaves to it. Their rest was to be a sign of resistance against the tyranny of the power-hungry, slave-driving Egyptian culture.
This pattern of rest in the Bible isn’t simply about feeling better ourselves. It’s about creating a way of life, in ourselves and our community, that intentionally resists the dominant culture’s abusive way of being. Which means, in our own time, when so many of us have become slaves to busyness, Sabbath serves as a resistance to all the assumptions of our culture.
In a culture that says, “You are defined by your work and career,” Sabbath proclaims, “You are a beloved child who rests in the love of God.” In a culture that says, “You need to constantly consume and produce,” Sabbath proclaims, “God has given me more than enough, and I rest in his overwhelming generosity.” In a culture that says, “The world is dependent on your work,” Sabbath proclaims, “I trust that God cares for creation, that God is not anxious about creation, and that the well-being of creation is not dependent on my endless, anxious work.”
Our world is constantly and tyrannically pressing in on us to do more, be more, consume more, hoard more. Sabbath is how we resist that tyranny and find lasting peace in the middle of an empire of busyness. God’s goodness isn’t made known to others by stressed, overanxious people, but by people deeply connected to his love and transformed by it into compassion toward their neighbor. Abraham Joshua Heschel writes:
He who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil. He must go away from the screech of dissonant days, from the nervousness and fury of acquiring. He must say farewell to manual work and learn to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without the help of man. Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else.
It cultivates a heart of gratitude. When we inhabit a culture constantly built on attaining more, we become people who increase in discontent. We either grow anxious about obtaining a little more so we can feel a little more comfortable or secure, or we become fearful of losing what we have, and so we grow stingy, unable to meaningfully practice generosity with our neighbors.
Sabbath is the cure for this discontent. It teaches us to cease the relentlessness of our busy, chasing culture and trains us to reflect on the manifold gifts of God all around us. It reminds us that we didn’t bring about our own existence, so we can become grateful to God for life itself. It reminds us that many of the things we care most about are gifts, not things we necessarily earned or grasped after. And when we take that posture, we can re-enter the busy world not as people who need to constantly rush after more, but as people deeply grateful for what we have, longing to steward it well. As Walter Brueggemann writes in Sabbath as Resistance:
“Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms. Whereas Israelites are always tempted to acquiring, Sabbath is an invitation to receptivity, an acknowledgment that what is needed is given and need not be seized.”
It creates intimacy with God. So much of our busy world is unable to meaningfully engage with God, not because we don’t want to, but because the hurried pace of our lives prevents us from being fully present to his work in our lives.
Imagine if, for an entire week, every time my wife wanted to spend time with me and talk—every time she wanted to communicate how she was feeling, or learn how I was doing, or simply enjoy being together—I was engaged with something else. Imagine if I always had my phone out, or was always thinking about work, always rushing around. And then imagine if I blamed her for not being present to me. The first thing I’d want someone to tell me is one word: “Stop.” I’d want someone to tell me to slow down, because I was missing deep connection with my wife.
And yet this is so often how we treat our relationship with God. We hurry and hurry and hurry, and then wonder why, after a week or a month or a year, we don’t feel near to him in any meaningful way. Perhaps it’s not God who is absent from us, but we who have become absent from God.
Sabbath teaches us the rhythm of being present with God. It teaches us to stop our overbusy lives and sit with him, listen to him, delight with him, enjoy him. The day empties our hands of the tight grip we have on all our activity, so we can simply open-handedly receive his presence and love and grace and joy in our lives.
How We Practice It
I can already hear the rebuttals: I barely have time for fifteen minutes of silence and solitude; there’s no way I could manage a whole day. For some of us, we’re so conditioned by busyness that we can’t even envision what a Sabbath would look like.
In general, there are four things to keep in mind as you build this practice in:
Pick a time. You’ve got to define the Sabbath ahead of time. It will not accidentally fall onto your schedule in a culture of busyness. You’ve got to build it in. If a full day feels like too much, start with half a day and work your way up, but actually put it on your calendar. Block off other things that don’t qualify as restful. Hold it like you would a doctor’s appointment; in many ways, it is an appointment with the Divine Healer of your soul.
Plan ahead. Because our lives are already so packed, we need to be people who plan ahead when it comes to Sabbath rest. Getting things done throughout the week in anticipation of the Sabbath is crucial. Hebrew scholar Tim Mackie once lived in Jerusalem for his PhD, in an apartment overlooking a market area of the city. Every Friday evening, when the Sabbath begins, a rabbi would walk around ringing a bell to announce its approach: eight hours ahead of time, then four, then one, then thirty minutes, then ten minutes. And on that day, Mackie noticed a larger influx of people at the market: they were getting everything they needed for the day of rest ahead of time, so that on the day itself they wouldn’t even be tempted to become busy with other things. Once you’ve picked your time, prioritize getting your busy things done early. Plan ahead.
Be reflective and creative. Remember: this is a day of delight, not just sitting on your hands. Spend time with God in prayer and consider what might bring you delight. A great Sabbath question to ask is this: What in the next twenty-four hours would bring me deep and profound rest and joy with God? Let that question guide your day.
Stop It
“If the devil can’t make us bad, he’ll make us busy.” -Corrie ten Boom
One of the primary ways the enemy works in our lives to create unhealth isn’t explicit, outright moral evil. It’s actually the compulsion to busyness, to hurry, born out of our insecurity or our attempts to keep up with the Joneses or whatever else. When we’re overbusy, we aren’t just going the way our culture goes: we are actively doing violence against ourselves, against the world, and against God, who wants to be for us the infinite joy that satisfies our infinite desire.
Sabbath is where that begins. Let’s become a community that resists the tyranny of our busy culture. Let’s become people of gratitude in a culture of discontent. Let’s become people unified deeply with the love and grace of God. Because when we do those things, it transforms us, and sends us into the world as non-anxious, loving, gracious people, vehicles of God’s love to a world caught in slavery to its own busyness.
Let’s do the most radical thing we can do: stop doing.
This is the second post in a short series called The Cure for Busyness*, exploring how Jesus and Scripture speak to our human propensity toward busyness — and prescribe practices in a life with God that serve as the cure. Read the first post,* Silence and Solitude, if you missed it.