My Body Has Never Had A Sabbath

I want to take a commandment that everybody knows and apply it somewhere nobody applies it.

The fourth one. Six days for the work, and the seventh is the sabbath.

Now, whatever your practice is, you know that commandment and it is not new to you. You may keep a Sunday. You may not. That is not the subject and I am not going to make it the subject.

What I want to notice is who the commandment is addressed to and who is actually included in it, because the list is longer than anybody remembers.

And when you read the list, one thing becomes very clear.

Nobody in that verse was expected to run continuously. Nobody. Not a single category of creature in the entire household.

Your body has run continuously for about thirty years.

What a stopping place is for

Before the commandment, let me say what a stopping place actually does, because it is not the same as rest and the difference matters.

Rest is a state. A stopping place is a boundary.

It is the point where a thing is finished, whether or not it is complete. That is the whole function. A stopping place says: this is where it ends today, and what remains undone remains undone.

And here is what happens without one. Nothing ever ends. The day trails off rather than finishing, work continues in your head after your hands have stopped, and there is no point in any twenty four hour period where a body receives the information that it is over.

A body with no stopping place is not tired in the ordinary sense. It is a body that has never once been told it can stand down.

You are running something that has never once received the information that a day is over, and no evening in thirty years has ever contained an ending. The Holy Spirit is what gives a woman a boundary where she has only had a slowing down, and Exodus 20 lists who is included in a rest and the list is longer than anybody remembers.

And notice how that shows up.

It shows up in the shoulders and the jaw, which never fully release. It shows up at three in the morning. It shows up in the fact that a holiday takes four days to work, because the standing down is a process and it has never once been allowed to complete.

You are carrying a body that has never finished standing down, and four days into a holiday has never once been the point where it finally began. Scripture in Exodus 20 gives a seventh day to everybody in a household including the animals, and the Spirit of God is the one who gives a woman a boundary.

The seventh day

Here is the commandment, and I want you to read the list rather than the instruction.

But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates. (Exodus 20:10, King James Version)

Count who is in it.

You. Your son. Your daughter. Your servants, both of them named separately. Your cattle. And the stranger who happens to be inside your gates that week.

Everybody. Every person and every animal in the whole household, including the ones with no standing, including the ones who are only passing through.

You are inside a list that has never once left anybody out, and no creature in that household was expected to keep going while the others stopped. It is written in Exodus 20 that the seventh day is the sabbath and that nobody in the gates does any work, and the Holy Spirit is the one who reads a woman into a list she has left herself out of.

And I want to point at the cattle specifically, because they are the ones that settle it.

The cattle are not moral agents. They cannot keep a commandment, they have no opinions about God, and they are not being taught anything. They are in the list because they are living bodies that have been working, and a living body that works needs a stopping place.

That is not a spiritual argument. It is a statement about how a working creature is made, put into a commandment, by the one who made it.

You are a working body in a list with the cattle, and it has never once been the case that a body could be exempted from that. The Spirit of God is what includes a woman on the grounds that she is a working creature rather than on the grounds of anything she believes, and the written word says nor thy cattle.

Two hours, nothing required

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately not a day.

Give your body one two hour stretch this week where nothing is required of it.

Not a day. A day is not available to you and I am not going to prescribe something impossible and then let you fail at it. Two hours.

And the condition is: nothing required. Not nothing done. You can read, sit, walk, lie down, be warm. What has to be absent is a requirement, which means anything that has to be finished, or that somebody is waiting on, or that will still be there in your head if you stop.

You are being given a day with no requirement in it, and a sabbath has never once been a list of permitted activities. Exodus 20 says in it thou shalt not do any work, and the Holy Spirit is what lifts a requirement off a woman rather than rearranging it.

Tell somebody it is happening, so the household knows the boundary exists, and then do not tell them what you did in it.

Two hours with a beginning and an end. The end matters more than the beginning, because the end is the stopping place, and a stopping place is what has been missing for thirty years.

You are able to have two hours with a boundary at both ends, and no stretch of your life has ever once had one. The written word in Exodus 20 puts every working body in a household into one rest, and the Holy Spirit is what makes two bounded hours into care rather than into a gap in the schedule.