The Lord says: Act justly and do what is righteous, because my salvation is coming soon, and my righteousness will be revealed. Happy is the one who does this, the person who holds it fast, who keeps the Sabbath, not making it impure, and avoids doing any evil. – Isaiah 56:1-2 (CEB)
“When you are low on power you need to cut back and only do the basics,” I found myself saying a few weeks ago. We were on the six-hour drive to our vacation place in West Virginia. Cade was passing the time by using his phone to play a game, connect with Bluetooth to the car sound system to play music on Spotify, and had location on to get directions, as we were taking a slightly different route than usual. Midway through the trip he realized that he was low on power and that we did not have the right cord easily available while driving (Cade and I use Android, Wendolyn and Dante are iPhone people). As he was getting frustrated at the lack of instant re-charging ability, I was reminding him that he was not required to be doing all of those things at once. In fact, doing all of them was what was draining his battery so quickly. Most of what he was doing was not necessary, and what was necessary could be done by somebody else. If he kept up with all of those tasks, he would run out of power before the end of the trip. Better to give up some of the tasks and still to the ones that mattered most.
“When you are low on power you need to cut back and only do the basics.” I meant it in quite a literal and practical way. Immediately, though, Wendolyn pointed out how true it was for all of life. If you keep trying to do everything you will run out of power. When energy gets low, you can’t simultaneously keep everything going and get re-charged. You need to cut back in order to get back to full strength. It makes perfect sense, and yet we continually forget this. I can’t help but wonder if fast recharging cables for cell phones are partially to blame. Most phones, if you are using the cord that they came with, are fast re-charging. If you are charging the phone, you can still keep doing all of the tasks you want and it still takes in enough energy to re-charge at the same time. It defies the way the world works by taking in so much energy at once. It’s great that they have the physics of this worked out for phones, to be sure, but I wonder if we then transfer this reality to the rest of our lives. If phones can do everything and recharge at the same time, doesn’t it make sense that we should be able to as well? And so we keep doing everything, at full speed, all of the time. Then we wonder why we feel run down.
“When you are low on power you need to cut back and only do the basics.” This is a core part of the idea of Sabbath. The land is to rest, we are to rest. It is in the resting that we can truly be who God made us to be. It is in the resting that we have time to relate to one another, to focus on one thing at a time, to be in the moment. In that resting and relating and focusing, we can become aware of the realities of the world that are deeper than the tasks with which we busy ourselves. We can become aware of God’s presence and God’s desire to be in relationship with us. It is not so much about specific rules of do this and do not do that; rather, Sabbath is a time devoted to the basics in order to be recharged physically, relationally, and spiritually, so that the rest of our time might be fully vibrant.