“It is a sign forever between me and the people of Israel that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed.” – Exodus 31:17
We took Ellie and Eric back to their old swim instructor this past weekend, because something looked off when Ellie swam the 50-yard butterfly at her last meet. Her head was coming up at a strange angle, and while it is the most tiring stroke, she seemed to struggle more than usual. Janet, their instructor, did comment on Ellie’s head position—she needs to get her head down and deep, so her legs rise up and drag less; her chin should not tilt up so much for a breath—but Ellie had a hard time getting it. Then Janet took Ellie’s hands in hers while they faced each other in the water. She moved their hands together under the water, in some way I couldn’t see. But the next length Ellie swam, she got it. She had better rhythm. Janet told me later Ellie was drawing her hands down closer to her hips on a breathing stroke as compared with a non-breathing stroke; adjusting this gave her what she needed to breathe easier.
This section in Exodus 31:12-17 segues well with the sermon on Sabbath. It strikes me here that God speaks about the Sabbath like he speaks about circumcision: it is a sign of the covenant, a sign that we are set apart for God. It is living out with material time the spiritual truth that we belong not to this world and its pursuits but most of all to a God who keeps us. He speaks of his own rest on the seventh day as his sign to us, and describes the purpose of that seventh day with two words: “rested” and “refreshed.” “Rested” is Hebrew shabath, which as Dean mentioned, literally means “to cease.”
“Refreshed” is Hebrew naphash, which literally means “to take a breath when weary.” It is only used 3 times in the Bible: here, again referring to the Sabbath in Exodus 31:17, and in an interesting story in 2 Samuel. David and his men were fleeing Absalom when someone from the house of Saul named Shimei came alongside them: “So David and his men went on the road, while Shimei went along on the hillside opposite him and cursed as he went and threw stones at him and flung dust. And the king, and all the people who were with him, arrived weary at the Jordan. And there he refreshed himself” (2 Samuel 16:13-14).
The story then cuts to Absalom; this is all we know about what it felt like for David to arrive at the end of that road: he was able to take a breath, to naphash. One can hardly imagine what that breath was like, after a journey like that. I think about Ellie, moving through the water. If you think about it, breathing is incredibly inconvenient for a swimmer; it slows them down so much. But Ellie has to come up to breathe. It is the sign of her humanness, of how she was created, that she’s not some other underwater creature. Taking that breath to her is life. For David, it was essential too, not just physically, but in every other way.
Learning how to cease and breathe, how to stop and take into ourselves what gives us renewed life, is a process. We’ve become convicted that weekly Sabbath is an important way, particularly in our culture here, to live out what we believe. But we’re still figuring it out. Stopping, not only on the outside but on the inside, is harder than it sounds, when all of our days are lived in endless loops of drop-offs and pick-ups and tasks. Breathing in what six different people need for refreshment, figuring out how to play and rest and serve together, takes some experimentation. We’re still finding our rhythm. We’re like Ellie, learning to adjust our hands under the water of life so we can come up for the breath that we need and flow better through the water. God never said it would be easy, or that it would even come that naturally to us, but he has shown us what we need. He has given it as his very promise to us.
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