As a culture in general, and as parents in particular, sometimes that “I’m so busy/exhausted/ragged” refrain becomes the banner we wave that proves we’re excelling.
Of course new parents are sleep deprived as they teach new little humans sleep skills & there are some great sleep consultants out there (@letsmothertogether, Mary Vaughn, e.g.,) who can help with that. But that’s not our focus today.
Today, we want to GET CURIOUS and see what the root of our busy might be and some ways we can switch our perspective to get to a healthier, more peaceful—restful–place.
In the Beginning:
As Julie Andrews sang in Sound of Music, let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start…
For people of faith, that would be Genesis and the creation story. Seen through a Jewish (Hebrew) lens, there’s more packed into these 7 days than we might catch.
If we read through the first chapter of Genesis, the very first glimpse of God, what are we given as a picture of creation as early as verse 2?
The earth was formless & empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep. We start with a bunch of chaotic nothing. Then God starts to create. First, He FORMS (days 1-3) and then He FILLS (days 4-6). You get land, sea, sky, light/dark and then all the stuff that goes in those places—sun/moon/stars, animals, plants, fish… Then, we get into the first bit of Chapter 2, which is Day 7: Creation is complete, so on the 7th day He rested from all His work. And blessed the 7th day and made it holy because on it He rested from all the work of creating.
And if you read it, at the end of each of these creative acts, they’re framed with “God saw that it was good and there was evening, and there was morning—the third day or the fourth day or fifth day.” There was evening and there was morning.
If you’re paying attention, that might stick out to you. There was evening and there was morning. In the West, we see the world differently. Our days begin with the sunrise, the opposite way: the sun rises–there was morning! And they end (for most of us) late at night.
Marty Solomon points out that actually, this poem may not be about the things we might have been taught it’s about because the logic is missing. First, it’s evening and morning. Second, plants are created on Day 3, the day of separating the land from the sea. The sun isn’t created until Day 4, but the plants can’t be created without the sun. How does that work scientifically? We’ve always measured time by the movement of the sun, but if the sun isn’t created till Day 4, how do we even know the first three days are days?
Genesis is not so much a lab report on what specifically went down at Creation, but it’s a story about creating and a story about resting.
The cool thing about this poem in Genesis (& many other OT stories) is that its structure is a chiasm, which in simple terms means you can find patterns in its beginning that mirror its end. So at the beginning, there was nothing and at the end—when creation is done—there’s rest (also nothing).
If you dissect it further (which we won’t go into here but it’s a really cool study), there’s also the Hebrew word moad in the dead center when he’s created sun, moon & stars. Moad translates into “seasons” or “sacred time” or…here’s a word you might be familiar with: “sabbath.”
A Note About Rest in Terms of Sleeping
Sleep or Don’t Sleep
Amy Joy 7/17/23
Do you ever come wide awake in the night?
I used to think, “If the scripture says that God gives to his beloved rest, and I am not resting, does that mean that I’m not his beloved?”
Such are the unkind mind games that I used to play at 3am.
I’ve had some mindset shifts, and some testimonies, and some training about rest. God gives to his beloved rest, but rest can take different forms.
Here are eight ideas that I have found helpful.
• If you wake in the night, you can pray, Lord, for every minute of sleep that I am lacking, I ask that you would give me two, or even more, until I have enough sleep. I believe that he is faithful in that.
• If you wake because of anxiety or some other negative thing, you may need to simply renounce it and send it away and ask the Lord to bless you with peace.
• I have heard that, physiologically, if you wake in an adrenaline rush, your body needs about 30 minutes for the adrenaline to clear out of your system. So if you happen to startle awake for some reason, you can get up and read, or put in earbuds and listen to an audio book, and simply let your adrenaline clear and your body relax.
• Kris Vallotton says that witch covens are most active around 3am, so if you’re sensitive in the spirit realm, you may wake then. Pray against the work of the evil one.
• Sometimes people wake and think of a friend. At this point, I always assume that’s a call to pray … even if they don’t know the need, I might be keeping the darkness away through my prayers.
• If I am processing a deep emotion—deep grief over a friend, for example—I might have a few weeks where my body wakes in the night, almost like my body needs some additional quiet alone time to work through the emotion. The wakefulness will not be a lifelong thing, but part of the human condition.
• Sometimes I wake because of so many bubbling thoughts. How exciting! I keep a sketchbook by my bed, and use my phone flashlight to write occasional thoughts until I drop off to sleep. Sometimes, though, I’ll get up for a few hours. I might need a nap the next day, but that’s part of life. I trust that the Lord will rearrange my schedule so I can get the sleep that I need in order to serve him effectively.
• Perhaps wakefulness at night is part of God’s method of breaking a sense of control. If two nights a week I happen to wake up because I’m having a creative outburst, the Lord has that under his control, even if I feel not in full control.
• A few years ago, Paul Van Hoesen, working on business to treat opioid addiction, said that he had a period where the Lord woke him up at the same time every night for 30 nights. He would pray and go back to sleep.
The 31st night, he wasn’t quite awake, and felt the Lord ask, “So are you in or are you out?”
“Oh, I am in, God.”
And in that moment, his circadian rhythm completely shifted. He went from sleeping a normal amount to getting maybe four hours of sleep a night. He’ll go to bed at midnight, sleep for an hour and a half, wake to spend time with God, his only time of quiet prayer and contemplation, then back to bed for a bit, and awake for a long day of work.
In the natural realm, there is no explanation for what happened to him at 67. For his circadian rhythm to shift in an instant … it’s a miracle.
• There’s also the research done on sleep in the Middle Ages. Without artificial lights, everybody would go to bed fairly early and sleep for about four hours. Then they would wake up for an hour or two, enjoy some marital bliss or pray or think, and then go back to sleep until it was time to get up.
In the West, I think we have a perception that if you’re not getting a solid, uninterrupted eight hours of sleep, then something’s wrong with you. But that has not been the case everywhere, through all of time.
• My favorite chapter in Andy Mason’s book, Finding Hope in Crazy Times, was titled “God Owns and Occupies Your Night.”
He talks about how the Genesis account states that darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters. He dwelled in the darkness and created in the darkness! The darkness is not a problem for him.
I started going to bed at night thanking God that He inhabited my night. I waited for the light to turn off and would lie there looking at the darkness and becoming aware that God was with me in the night. I would breathe in deeply thanking Him that He is my very breath. I would put on audio version of Psalms so that my last waking moment was listening to His Word.
It was in darkness that God’s creativity was first unleashed.
Is it possible that instead of dreading the darkness, He wants us to own it, and find Him there? Is it possible that the night is the very time that He wants to unleash creative solutions to the problems we are facing – if we will get rid of the lies that stop us?
Lord, thank you that you dwell with us in the darkness. Thank you that you go before us, that you unleash creativity even as we sleep. Let us use our days and our nights for your glory.
Peace has come,
Amy Joy
Who’s Genesis Talking To?
So this is the really cool part.
If you’re an average Israelite at the time, guess what you’ve been doing for the past 430 years. You’ve just busted out of Egypt, crossed the Red Sea and are now in the desert. For GENERATIONS your identity has been SLAVE.
Your VALUE has been measured by the number of bricks you can make. Once you’re no longer able to make bricks, you’re useless, done.
You’re working sunup to sundown, 7 days a week because you’re a slave. It’s all about production. Grinding it out.
The first thing God says to these people is hold up. You gotta learn how to take a break. And also: you are the crowning moment of God’s creation. Everything about creation and you is just right. It’s not perfect, we all know that. But it’s GOOD. It’s creative and it’s got potential and it’s good.
That evening & morning refrain that goes on for all the 6 days of creation is not there on the 7th day. It’s like the 7th day (rest) is for us to hold onto at any time.
Is Genesis Talking to Me?
The first time I heard this and it struck me it was one of those “the light has dawned” moments. Because I’m a certain temperament that likes to make lists and cross off tasks and have “accomplished something” in my day.
Our whole Western culture is wrapped up in our bricks and fearfully asking that question “am I enough?” Am I skinny enough? Smart enough? Rich enough? Mom enough? Do I have the best career?
We produce. We grind. We churn. We impress. We strive. We angle.
We are STILL SLAVES making those bricks to prove our worth that GOD ALREADY SAYS He loves and delights in. It’s good. We’re good.
Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline, “The disciplined person is the person who can do what needs to be done when it needs to be done.” (p99)
The first thing God says to us, has always been saying to us is: You need to know how to stop. You need to know how to Sabbath. You need to know how to sit back and ENJOY those little babies you created.
It took God a day to get the Israelites out of Egypt but over 40 years to get Egypt out of the Israelites. More than that, actually, because we’ve inherited the same mindset. You know the chilling sign that hung over Auschwitz read: Arbeit macht frei…work makes one free. It’s a LIE.
So that evening & morning thing? The Jewish day begins at sundown. Sabbath begins at sunset on Fridays. Why? It’s a reminder that your day doesn’t begin with production. It doesn’t begin with getting out of bed thinking about all the things you have to do today. Your day begins with resting. The first thing you do in the Jewish world every day is you go to bed.
The first thing you do is rest because your identity lies in who you are created by God, not what you do. You are not valuable because of your ability to make bricks. You are valuable because you are the crowning moment of my good creation.
Adam & Eve’s first full day was rest, not work. We work from rest, not rest from work. Rest is a gift, not a reward for the job well done. So many of us—our entire culture!—have it backwards. In our culture, workaholics are often applauded, but you know what the “holic” part of that word means? It’s a person having an abnormal desire or dependence on. Not healthy. Not how we were created.
We are image-bearers with work to do, not workers with an image to maintain. (from Ian Simkins)
Instead of asking ourselves the usual question, Have I worked hard enough to rest, maybe we should switch it around and ask Have I rested hard enough to work?
Learning How to Rest
We talk a lot about our “work ethic.” Our good old Puritan founders honed in on it as an antidote to laziness. But if we ONLY have that and no “rest ethic,” there will be an imbalance to life. We were not created for a life we don’t have time for.
We know this—we are not inherently more loving and generous and full of grace when we are exhausted. I know I’m not!
Ian Simkins has some good things to say about this subject, and one of those is his observance about Luke 10—the Martha & Mary story. Martha was distracted by good tasks. I can so relate to that! Good things can become the enemy of the best things (the point of that story). If busyness is your drug, rest will feel like stress.
We used to joke about my father in our house—how he didn’t know how to relax. There was always something he was itching to do, some task he could be doing. Maybe this is an inherited thing or a learned thing? But certainly I’ve noticed that about myself. We have a lovely backyard—the reason we bought the house we live in!!—and I find it SO HARD to sit by the pool and read because I’m seeing the weeds that need to be pulled or the fence should be pressure washed, or …..
I’ve really had to learn how to rest and enjoy! That only happens by doing it. Practicing it. Would your head explode if you didn’t make the bed one day? Would you lose it if you left the dishes in the sink overnight?
I’m not talking about living in filth on a regular basis… I’m just wondering if there is EVER a task you can peacefully leave undone or a whole DAY you can go with zero work and be ok with it. Only rest and play. (aside from a scheduled vacation).
THAT is the definition of Sabbath. We rest & play; no work: God loves us.
**It may be worth noting here that many of us avoid stillness/rest because of the patterns that run our lives. One way to think about destructive patterns is that they are subconscious pain that is discharged or avoided through action. When we’re still/quiet and not active (running/busy/scheduled/working), pain might surface, allowing us to work on the root of that issue. Until we can hold the discomfort of life with stillness and presence, our inner self will continue to push us into unconscious reactivity/busyness (and sometimes destructive patterns).
In a culture like ours, rest can be actual spiritual warfare.
Solomon says that 99% of us have grown up in a Christianity that tells us we are inherently evil and screwed up and bad and sinful we are and how angry God should be at us. Sabbath reminds us of a much deeper, much more essential foundational truth.
There will be truths in that other stuff. There’s a truth about our sin and we need to deal with that, but far too often we start the story in Genesis 3. We start with the screw-up and the sinfulness of humanity. We need to stop at Genesis 1 and just learn how to rest. Before we learn about how screwed up we are, we have to learn how to just rest in the fact that fundamentally above all other things, what God wanted to teach us first is that we were loved.
I think Sabbath is one of the biggest ways we learn how to do that because we have to learn how to turn off that thing that tells us we have to keep going. Turn off. We have an off button and we need to learn how to use that and be okay.
As Anne Lamott says, “Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”
Trevin Wax pointed out in a recent article that on various apps and sites, our calendar has shifted to Monday as the first day of the week. The default has changed from Sunday.
Monday is the start of the “workweek.” Unless we’re looking at time from the Jewish perspective, where the day/week begins with rest and worship… Unless we recognize that our work and creativity and best selves come FROM rest.
In practical terms, how do we figure out how much time we need for Sabbath rest, and how do we spend that time? The following are a few suggestions or guidelines and are by no means exhaustive.
From Tim Keller:
WHAT IS THE IDEAL AMOUNT OF TIME OFF FROM WORK?
The Ten Commandments require one day (twenty-four hours) off each week. When God gave these commandments, the Hebrews had been working from sunup to sundown, but the gift of the Sabbath was to stop working at sundown on Friday and rest until sundown on Saturday.
If you look at the Scripture, there’s nothing that says you have to confine yourself to a forty- or fifty-hour work week. I suggest that to be within the biblical boundaries, you need to have at least one full day off, and the equivalent of an additional half-day off during the week.
For example, if your work and commute take up almost all of your weekdays but you have a full weekend off, with church participation on Sundays, then that is probably a sufficient Sabbath. Or if you get one full day off per week, and perhaps three evenings free after 6:00 p.m, you can live a pretty balanced life. This still allows quite a lot of hours for work during the week.
WHAT COUNTS AS TIME OFF?
Of course, ”making the most of every opportunity” is not simple. It never has been simple. Yes, two hours spent in prayer with God will produce far more spiritual benefits than watching an old Cary Grant movie; yet, recreation is something you must have! Mental refreshment is part of a balanced diet for the body and soul, so prayer cannot replace all recreation, exercise, and so on. Sabbath encompasses several different types of rest, as outlined below.
1. TAKE SOME TIME FOR SHEER INACTIVITY.
Most people need some time every week that is unplanned and unstructured, in which you can do whatever you feel like doing. If your Sabbath time is very busy and filled with scheduled activities of “recreation” and ministry, it will not suffice. There must be some cessation from activity or exertion. This pause in the work cycle is analogous to Israel’s practice of letting a field lie fallow every seventh year to produce whatever happened to grow (Leviticus 25:1–7). The soil rested so over-farming would not deplete its nutrients and destroy its ability to keep producing. Whatever came up in the soil came up. You need some unscheduled time like that every week to let come up—out of the heart and mind— whatever will.
2. TAKE SOME TIME FOR AVOCATIONAL ACTIVITY.
An avocation is something that is sheer pleasure to you, but that does require some intentionality and gives some structure to your Sabbath rest. In many cases an avocation is something that others do for ”work,” which is analogous to occasionally planting a different crop in a field to replenish the nutrients and make the soil more fertile for its normal crop. Include these elements:
• You need some contemplative rest. Prayer and worship are a critical part of Sabbath rest, from any perspective. Regular time for devotion, reading the Scripture, and listening to God forms the basis for inner rest and provides time away from the more exhausting exertions of life.
• You need some recreational rest. The Puritans and others were rightly skeptical of recreations that required spending a great deal of money and time and exertion, because those types of recreations exhaust people. Be careful that recreation really refreshes.
• You need to include aesthetic rest. Expose yourself to works of God’s creation that refresh and energize you, and that you find beautiful. This may mean outdoor things. It may mean art—music, drama, and visual art. God looked around at the world he made and said it was good, so aesthetic rest is necessary for participating in God’s Sabbath fully.
3. CONSIDER WHETHER YOU ARE AN INTROVERT OR AN EXTROVERT.
When planning your Sabbath rest, ask yourself what really “recharges” you. This self-assessment can help you determine how relational your Sabbath time should be. Introverts tend to spend their energy when out with people and recharge their batteries by being alone. Extroverts tend to spend energy in personal work and recharge their batteries by getting out with people.
If you are a real introvert, be careful about trying to maintain all of your community-building relationships during your Sabbath time. That would be too draining. On the other hand, relationship-building could be one of the greatest things a true extrovert could possibly do. Don’t try to imitate an introvert’s Sabbath rhythms if you are an extrovert or vice versa! Recognize that some avocational activities take you into solitude, while some take you out into society.
4. DON’T NECESSARILY COUNT FAMILY TIME AS SABBATH TIME.
Do a realistic self-assessment of “family time” and how it affects you. Family time is important, but parents need to be very careful that they don’t let all of their regular Sabbath time be taken up with parental responsibilities. (Introverts especially will need time away from the kids!) Keeping all of these things in good balance may be virtually impossible when your children are very young, but this too will pass.
5. HONOR BOTH MICRO- AND MACRO-RHYTHMS IN YOUR SEASONS OF REST.
Israel’s Sabbath cycles of rest-and-work included not only Sabbath days but also Sabbath years and even a Year of Jubilee every forty-nine years (Leviticus 25:8–11). This is a crucial insight for workers in today’s world. It is possible to voluntarily take on a season of work that requires high energy, long hours, and insufficient weekly-Sabbath time. A new physician has to work long hours in a residency program, for example, and many other careers (such as finance, government, and law) similarly demand some sort of initial period of heavy, intense work. Starting your own business or pursuing a major project like making a movie will require something similar. In these situations you have to watch that you don’t justify too little Sabbath by saying you’re “going through a season”—when in actual fact that season never ends.
If you must enter a season like this, it should not last longer than two or three years at the most. Be accountable to someone for this, or you will get locked into an “under-Sabbathed” lifestyle, and you will burn out. And during this “under-Sabbathed” time, do not let the rhythms of prayer, Bible study, and worship die. Be creative, but get it in.
Renee’s recent practice of Sabbath Wednesdays… How did you come to want to do this? How has it gone?
Kairos and Kronos: A Prayer about Time, From Amy Joy Lykosh, email on 1/13/23
Lord, I refuse to partner with Kronos any longer. I say to you, Kronos, be gone, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Lord, bless me with the fullness of time. Fill me, Lord, with the fullness of joy. May I not operate out of performance any more, but out of your goodness and grace. You are my Lord. Thank you for your goodness. Thank you that you offer a better way.
Explanation:
Kronos, the god of time in Greek mythology, was the supreme god until dethroned by Zeus.
He is not the god of rest time, of sleep and worship and glory.
He’s the god of crack-the-whip-over-your-head, “You’re behind, hurry up, what a failure, faster!” time. Horrible, stressful, awful time. The time that leaves you breathless and defeated. “Time when viewed as a destructive, all-devouring force,” as one website puts it.
Yes, break that off!
But there’s another kind of time, kairos time, the time that’s a propitious moment for decision or action.
Think of Mark 1:15, when the appointed time in the purpose of God has come, and the kingdom of God is at hand.
It’s the fullness of time.
Can you imagine the blessing, the rest, that comes from trusting that God gives his faithful children time enough to accomplish what he has for us, without panic, stress, or agitation?
Can you imagine living out of God’s gift of plenty, of sufficiency, of lack of hurry?
To walk with God, not run ahead of him, nor, of course, lag behind?
As we move forward in learning about prayer and identity, you might find yourself almost gasping at times at the grief that you didn’t already know this. How much easier life would’ve been…
But this is the fullness of time. Celebrate what you’ve been given, and give to God any grief over the years that were lost.
Thank God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus, the Messiah.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the Jewish classics written this century, wrote a book called The Sabbath if you want to do a deeper dive into this subject.