The writer Malcolm Gladwell described the secret rule for mastery: ten thousand hours. It fit a narrative of the moment about the need for hard work, determination, and grit.

The Protestant Work Ethic, a foundational part of puritan life in North America, has long championed work itself as virtuous— and the source of God’s blessing and fortune. And rest (and other acts of idleness) is therefore sinful and deplorable.

What these ideas (and their many variants, like today’s grind culture and its corollary, the “gig economy“) offer is an orientation away from rest. 

And we’re pressing your youth into this stuff from the time we send them off to school.

Regular, deep rest is something God not only commands the people have, but orders the world around it. God doesn’t order the world around work, but around rest!

When the pressure is off, we are able to live. We are freed from shackles of anxiety and offered a way of new, vibrant living. In short, only in Sabbath may the real us emerge.

Free yourself, and your neighbor, by making Sabbath the center of our lives.