Keeping the Sabbath Wholly

A guest post by my beautiful bride, Michelle Lazarus:

As we are looking forward to our vacation, I thought it would be fitting to recommend a book that I am currently reading about the topic of rest. It is called “Keeping the Sabbath Wholly” by Marva Dawn. And though I’m not finished with it yet, the chapters that I have read have been very helpful and informative.

Being married to a very busy man and also spending my days with a 1-year-old and a 2-year-old, I very often feel like rest will just have to wait for another season of life. Larry does “have a Sabbath day” every week, when we theoretically get to enjoy the day together as a family. But for the past several months, I have felt like there is just something missing to our day of rest…something very important.

I have begun to wonder more and more about how I can serve my family more faithfully by making sure we have a day to connect with God and with each other; and to really enjoy these primary relationships in our home; and to see each other flourishing throughout the remainder of the week because of the rest we have gotten for our bodies, minds and souls on our Sabbath day.

Most importantly, I want to be pleasing to the Lord in our weekly observance of the Sabbath (for goodness’ sake, it is one of the 10 commandments! and I don’t think He means for us to just go to church on Sunday and consider ourselves ‘good’!), while not being legalistic either by just filling up another day with things to do. If the Sabbath is made for man, and not man for the Sabbath, I want to take advantage of the power and the peace that lies in this hidden practice that I really don’t know much about.

So anyway…that is some background as to why I think this is an important topic to study. And after some careful consideration of the dozen or so books that I found regarding the Sabbath, this is one of them that seemed to look really good.

In closing, here is the dedication found in the beginning of the book, which made me excited to read the rest of it. I hope I’ve enticed you to join me in my search for more wisdom and guidance in this area.

This book is dedicated to all the people who need the Sabbath—

the busiest, who need to work from a cohesive, unfragmented self;
social activists, who need a cycle of worship and action;
those who chase after fulfillment and need to understand their deepest yearnings and to hear the silence;
those who have lost their ability to play because of the materialism and technologization of our society, who need beauty and gaiety and delight;
those who have lost their passion and need to get in touch with feelings;
those who are alone and need emotional nourishment;
those who live in community and need solitude;
those who cannot find their life’s priorities and need a new perspective;
those who think the future is dictated by the present, who need hope and visions of the future to change the present order;
those who long for deeper family life and want to nurture certain values;
the poor and the oppressed, who need to mourn and to dance in the prison camp;
the rich and the oppressors, who need to learn nonviolence, stewardship, and God’s purposes in the world;
those who suffer, who need to learn how suffering can be redemptive;
professional theologians, who need to bring the heart back into theology;
those who don’t know how religion fits into the modern world, who need a relationship with God;
those who are disgusted with dry, empty, formalistic worship and want to love and adore God; those who want to be God’s instruments, enabled and empowered by the Spirit to be world changers and Sabbath healers.