Cease

“… for whoever had entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.” – Hebrews 4:10

“And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done.” – Genesis 2:2

One of the greatest mysteries is that the culmination of creation is—rest. In Hebrew, the word is shabath, which literally means “to cease.” Each new creation is a step towards the completion that occurs on the Sabbath, the act of stopping. To us, to our society, this makes no sense. Why do it all just to stop? Why is stopping so important? Rabbi Elijah of Vilna said: God stopped to show us that what we create becomes meaningful to us only once we stop creating it and start to think about why we did so. As Judith Shulevitz puts it in a New York Times article, “We have to remember to stop because we have to stop to remember.” Sabbath at heart is not about leisure or socialization: it is theater, designed to convey a certain story about who we are. Stopping helps us remember how and why we work. It helps us remember how and why we exist, as image-bearers of God, people who are more than our work. 

But stopping does not come easily. Shulevitz writes, “Most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is not work. The inventors of the Sabbath understood that it was a much more complicated undertaking. You cannot downshift casually and easily, the way you might slip into bed at the end of a long day… This is why the Puritan and Jewish Sabbaths were so exactingly intentional, requiring extensive advance preparation—at the very least a scrubbed house, a full larder and a bath. The rules did not exist to torture the faithful. They were meant to communicate the insight that interrupting the ceaseless round of striving requires a surprisingly strenuous act of will.”

Surprisingly strenuous, indeed, especially now, when work and home life blur together. To cease work nowadays may mean not going into your home office, not checking emails or doing work on the computer. It is good to practice stopping as a family, but those of us with kids at home may also be struggling with the perennial question: how does one stop when your work is being a parent? I’ve come to no brilliant answers other than advance planning and resource investment. As a mom, my Sabbaths occur when Dave or a sitter watches the kids and I can stop mothering for a bit: days at a retreat center a few times a year, monthly afternoons out alone. Ironically, the first step to Sabbath requires some work. Stopping requires preparation. But it is important. Before we can learn what it means to enter God’s rest, we have to learn how to cease from ours.