When it comes to exercise, I am consistently challenged in one area.

The Cool Down.

Even though it may be one of the most important elements in my fitness training, I tend to lift that last weight, let out a big sigh of relief that it’s over, and then go about on my merry way. I diss the cool down.
I blow it off in exercise.
And I blow it off in life.

Observing the Sabbath has ALWAYS been difficult for me. Mainly because I struggle to put on the brakes. Praise God for walking me over to my chair each morning for some necessary “sit still in the corner” time. I crave it, and look forward to having an entire day for rest and refuel. But, which day?

As a Pastor’s wife, Sundays are NOT that day.

So when? When do I accept God’s gift of the Sabbath? On what day do I obey the command to “keep the Sabbath holy?”

Honestly, I’m working that through and don’t have an answer yet. I HAVE gotten myself to a place where I only work my actual job 6 days a week, as I work from home, but I can’t help thinking there must be more to the command God gives us to “keep the Sabbath holy”. For Sabbath, a gift God made for us, can not only revolve around taking the day off from one’s job.

I do know why I consider honoring the Sabbath to be a spiritual discipline: because it is so easily disregarded. Thus, it needs to be practiced. It is a skill to be honed. A habit to be formed.

And I desperately want it.

Sabbath ceasing [means] to cease not only from work itself, but also from the need to accomplish and be productive, from the worry and tension that accompany our modern criterion of efficiency, from our efforts to be in control of our lives as if we were God, from our possessiveness and our enculturation, and finally, from the humdrum and meaninglessness that result when life is pursued without the Lord at the center of it all.
– Marva J. Dawn
Keeping the Sabbath Whollyfrom Verse and Voice, a daily e-mail sent by Sojourners
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