Keeping the Sabbath in the 21st Century

Hello Everyone!  Today we have a great post by Cindy O'Donnell. I'll be honest, this post made me check myself, because rest is not something I do all that well.  Rest is often over looked.  What I love about this topic is that it not only affects our emotional state but it also will improve our spiritual and physical state.  Here is what Cindy has to say:

I woke up at 6:30am to get ready for work and get my daughter off to school, after dropping my daughter off at her school I ran to the first meeting of my day.  This particular meeting usually lasted several hours, which then gave me just enough time to run home grab something to eat (sometimes forgoing eating and squeezing in an appointment) and then going to my second job.  Round trip this brought me back home by 9:30pm.  I then would debate about whether or not to eat, talk to my family or go to bed.  Many nights would result in a crabby person walking in the door, resulting from hunger and tiredness.  The problem with this particular kind of a schedule is that is was a norm for me, not an exception.  Many of you may be able to relate to this and are thinking so what is the big deal?

STRESS…that is the big deal.  We are a society that suffers from hurriedness, stress and anxiety in proportional numbers.  Many refuse to see this epidemic until it is too late.  We reward the go, go, goers and anything else may be seen as lazy.  The word rest is not in many peoples vocabulary.  It is as if how to rest needs to be taught.  One of the many things that I do with my clients is teach people how to rest, not just sleep, but also rest our bodies, our minds and our souls.  

One of the mandatory laws of the Old Testament was keeping the Sabbath Holy or taking a day of rest.  This particular law if broken was punishable by death.  Interesting, huh?  Today that same punishment does not exist…or does it?  I mean when we fail to care for ourselves, give our bodies rest and rid ourselves of hurriedness, the result is a gradual death.  According to the American Sociological Association stress keeps more then 40% of Americans up at night.  That means almost half the population is walking around sleepless and tired during the waking hours of the day!  All stress is not bad in fact stress has a place in our life, it is the fight or flight reaction that says the house is on fire and I need to get out, but often we get stuck on “on” and normal stress becomes distress and this distress can lead to this gradual death.    Stress can lead people into addictive behaviors such as, overeating, drinking, over spending, gambling etc.  It can affect our physical health from tummy troubles, to cardiac issues and multiple mental health concerns.  Just to name a few.

So what do you do?  Quite your job and move to the country?  Well for some this is exactly what they have done.  People don’t have to always make such drastic changes.  They do need to learn how to slow down and REST.  How many of you can say that you are comfortable sitting down for 5 minutes and doing nothing?  If you are and you do this, great!  If not you should try it.  Go ahead, sit down, turn a timer on and rest.  How many of you made it for the full 5 minutes?  You don’t have to raise your hand but for many of you this was a challenge. This will be challenge in many areas of our lives.  Self care, including resting is usually seen as laziness, slacking off or not being a team player.  The one thing that can help aide in our physical, mental and spiritual health is looked down upon and discouraged.  So for those of you who believe in the need for rest have hope and be willing to step up and make time for rest, make it a priority.  Priorities often require change.

Let’s define what I mean by rest.  Rest is not taking a vacation to Disney Land.  It is not going to the gym, jogging or taking a class.  Those are great things and can be enjoyable but are not exclusively what I mean by resting.  Archibald Hart defines rest is this, “Rest is not the time to catch up on unfinished chores, run missing errands, go to the mall, or even take in a movie.  These are activities, and activities are not rest producing.  What characterizes rest is that it is not an activity.  It is pure, luxurious leisure, time to rediscover yourself, catch up on your feelings, determine new priorities, recreate a sense of balance, and, most importantly of all, restore your soul and reconnect with God.”  How many of you do this on a regular basis?

So where do I begin?  So glad you asked.  In his, book The Anxiety Cure; Hart outlines seven ways to maintain this idea of rest.

1. Pay careful attention to developing an awareness of you limits.  We all have limits.  Not one of us is superhuman.  God didn’t create us that way.  Like all creatures, we not only have our limits, but we have to learn to stay, work, and live within them.
2. Never work until you have reached your limits.  Many get into the habit of working until getting a signal to stop, such as exhaustion, fatigue, headache, or dizziness.  They just keep going until they are about to drop.  Once you start to experience a stress-like symptom, you have gone too far.  Learn to stop before you get to the edge of you limits.
3. The moment you realize that you are approaching your limit, stop.  I mean stop right there and then.  Do not wait until your eyestrain, pain, or headache kicks in.  Your goal should be to never create a stress symptom, but to stop well before the edge.
4. Maintain regular breaks during your workday.  You will find that if you stop periodically and relax so as to lower your adrenaline, you will in fact be able to keep going longer.  It’s like running a marathon race.  If you keep going full speed, you will drop before you get to the end of the race.  If you pace yourself, allowing times of less energy drain, your system has an opportunity to rejuvenate itself during the race.
5. If you exceed your limits and find yourself in stress of pain, back off and allow time for recovery.  Once you trigger a pain or other stress response, your body not only needs to rejuvenate itself from the adrenaline over draft you’ve created, but it also has to heal the damage you have done.
6. Take a good Sabbath rest at the end of every day.  The most
   
   important discovery I made regarding my own stress abuses is that I neglected to rest every day.  I thought I could just keep going and make up for my depletion every week, month, or even year.  Not a good idea.  In fact, it’s crazy.  We need daily renewal.  This means you must allow enough time for relaxing, and sleeping each day.
7. Take a good sabbath rest at weekends.  As discussed earlier, I am not advocating a literal Sabbath as per the Old Testament, though this may not be a bad idea.  The principle I support is “taking a break.”  Those of us in Christian work are perhaps the biggest culprits.  We are deluded into thinking that just because we are doing God’s work, we are excused from all the restrictions of being in human bodies.  We are not.  Rest is just as important in Christian work as it is in daily work.

These principles can be quite a lot to take in, but I encourage you to really think about them and the ways in which to incorporate them into your life.  They do require some change but in the end it will be well worth it.  Next time we will be talking about the difference between rest and relaxation, as both are necessary for our health.

By: Cindy O'Donnell, LCSW