Weekend Rest

For almost my entire life, the idea of keeping a sabbath was synonymous with keeping Sunday a special day.  Sunday was a day for going to church.  When I was a little girl everything was closed on Sundays, which definitely made the day “special” because it was deliriously boring.  (I hated Sunday when I was a kid).  When we were first married and when our kids were little, we would come home from church and take a wonderful long afternoon nap to mark “rest day.”  In fact, up until about last year, I was relentlessly protective of Sunday afternoon naps.  I still am in the summer, but I knew that various schedule changes coming our way this fall would make Sunday a day that was not going to be restful for me.

Our family goes to church on Sunday mornings, which is special in and of itself, but because I’m an introvert, being around all the people I love at church exhausts me.  Getting my family out the door on a Sunday morning can be very frustrating, and for the latter part of our church morning I am involved in children’s ministry.  I love children’s ministry, but I’m telling you, I come home from church worn out every week, and that’s precisely when my own children decide to be difficult about one matter or another.

After church, it’s a frenzy in the kitchen to feed people lunch, and then we need to jump right into homework completion and practicing so that The Banana and I can leave for our choir rehearsals later in the day.  By the time homework and practicing is finished, it’s usually time for us to leave, and none of that craziness amounts to rest for me.

This summer I listened to a couple of different podcasts where the person being interviewed happened to be discussing what keeping the sabbath looked like for them, and they mentioned that for various reasons, often because they were involved in outputting a lot on Sundays, they decided to choose a different day for their “rest day,” and they marked that day by embarking on specific things that were restful to them so that they could relax and connect with God.

I had this in the back of my mind when our school year started, and so this fall I’ve been careful to mark my rest day on Friday evening and Saturday morning, and I’m loving it!  I find it a little ironic that in Jewish tradition that actually is the sabbath, but that’s not why I picked that particular time.  Friday evening all the activities for the week are finished!  Saturday morning I get to sleep in!  I can hang out in my bed as long as I want.  I can spend special time with with special people in my family who aren’t very busy then either.  I don’t rest in exactly the same way every week, but I do choose to do restful things during that time, and I feel so much less frustrated at the pace of my Sunday because all of he sudden I’m starting Sunday well rested.