Sabbatical started a month ago and to be honest it was a rough start. My husband went down day one with a shoulder strain that took a few weeks to work out. Thankfully it wasn’t worse but we didn’t know the first week if he was headed for a much more intense recovery process or not.

My first wrestling match was with entitlement to this season of rest. Is my time really my own…ever? Or must it always be surrendered to God?

Going from pretty full, active, and social days to longer stretches of time without set plans takes some adjustment. I found myself mentally searching for helpful things to be and do for people more to chase away insecurity than really serving the Lord.

Before long I faced another wrestling match with identity. How much does my vocation define my identity? Well, more than I want and more than I thought.

When I read about Sabbath rest in the Bible, the activities seem to revolve around worship, community, and cessation of activities related to providing for ourselves in some way. It was a time to trust that God provides now and in the future. Sabbath involved lots of fun things like corporate worship and eating good food ideally prepared ahead of time so that no one was really working hard on it on the day of rest. Sabbath was for everyone, men and women, moms and dads, sons and daughters, grandparents, and also those who served.

Rest and sabbath in the Bible is really fascinating. Let’s just say, there was a lot of prescribed rest and partying happening! It wasn’t just priests or pastors or educators that took Sabbatical. Everyone was entitled, actually commanded to take sabbatical every 7th year. Every 49th year Sabbath flowed into the 50th Year of Jubilee in Israel which was also a sabbatical rest.

Every 7th year, the people of Israel were to give the land a whole year of rest. Every 50th year was an extra year of rest for the land and a year of wiping the debt slate clean, zeroing out any land transfers or debts people made during years of trouble. Each clan got their land back from whoever they had sold (rented really) their land to if they came under hard times. These years were also years when no planting took place.

Two years in a row there was no planting, just eating what grew on its own, trusting that God would bring something up. Trusting that the previous years plants shed some seeds into the Land and God would make them grow. God also promised on year 6 or 48 to provide such abundant crops to provide for the next year or years of sabbath rest.

Trust in God’s provision, then, began the year before the sabbath year. Would he provide double or triple like promised? I imagine I’d be pretty anxiously watching plants grow that 6th year.

The sad reality is that the people, as far as I can tell, never really trusted God enough individually or corporately to take God at His promise and rest themselves or the land. Their failure to Sabbath once a week, one year every 7th year revealed their heart’s true posture towards God. And I sense in myself the testing that comes with resting too. I am pretty sure I’d go with the crowd too.

The battles with entitlement as if I earned rest rather than receive it as a free gift. The battles with identity as if I define my worth through what I accomplish rather than receive my identity and worth as another gift from God.

Then another battle with the posture of my soul during sabbath. So much of sabbath from what I can tell was about indulgence in God and His gifts of community and creation. There’s no way to repay Him by trying in futility to devote every moment to something directly “godly” like reading my Bible or praying. I am realizing that is kind of the point of sabbath too. To receive and rest and contemplate that I cannot and am not required to do anything to earn my way into God’s good favor outside of being with Him.

I’m sure my thoughts are not completely formed on sabbath and may never reach completion. Sabbath rest never ended for God’s people no matter how old they got. They never reached a place where God felt they didn’t need it. I imagine it was always startling each 7th day, 49th year, 50th year…to contemplate our very real relationship with our Creator God.