The SABBATH Rest

Today is Saturday, the last day of the writing week, and I’m really looking forward to my Sunday off! One of The Challenge’s best features is the chance to step away from the pressure of producing posts for a day and just stop to breathe and reevaluate where I find myself in this ongoing project.

I wondered what I’d do with the spare time. I thought I’d try to catch up a little on replying to comments and visiting other blogs. Perhaps I’d look ahead to the coming week and do whatever I could to prepare for upcoming posts. Or maybe I’d avoid the computer completely that day and try to remember what life was like before my fingers were continually connected to a keyboard.

As it has turned out, the third option has prevailed in the two post-less Sundays we ‘ve had thus far this month, not by choice necessarily, but out of necessity. I had to catch up on some of the other tasks I’ve left neglected in the weeks I’ve devoted my time to this all-consuming one. I’ve visited with people I love instead of blogs I‘m devoted to. And I’ve looked ahead to see what I absolutely have to accomplish in this one blog-free day as I prepare to dive into six successive days of delightful blogging bondage. I’ve found that taking a break from the mad rush of the previous week gives my mind a chance to re-center my thoughts and my focus, allowing me to jump into Monday ready to roll once more.

Mere minutes before the writing of this post I was editing a different one for publication on a separate blog, struggling to change the alignment of a portion of the text using the recently upgraded Blogger text editor and finding nothing but frustration in the attempt. The text remained stubbornly on the left side of the page despite my attempts to center it. I reached the end of my allotted time for that project with the problem yet unsolved, yet deliberately tore my thoughts away from it and washed the tension away completely with a few deep breaths and some silent prayer, before pulling up a blank page and jumping into the blogging fray once more.

And surely that’s what God intended when He included the Sabbath rest in the guidelines for successful living we find written in His Word. He knew how badly off-center we’d become in our attempts to make it through our days, and instructed us to take a day off from our work to center our thoughts, hearts and lives on Him. Doing so allows us to enter the new work-week refreshed and refocused with our priorities readjusted, well able to take on the task of daily living once more.

Long before the idea of taking Sundays off became a guideline in The Blogging Challenge, it was God’s solution to successfully surviving a challenging life.

“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work…”
(Exodus 20:8-10 NIV)