Leisure

Somewhere between the hustle culture sermons about “grinding for the Kingdom” and your boss passive-aggressively emailing you at 10 p.m. with a “quick question,” the idea of actual, soul-filling rest has been lost.

Rest isn’t just a luxury—it’s a necessity. A spiritual, emotional, and even physical game-changer that modern life is actively working against. We treat it like a reward for productivity, something we “earn” by checking enough boxes. But that’s not how it works. If you only allow yourself to rest when you’ve run out of energy, you’re not actually resting. You’re recovering from burnout.

For a generation that’s really into “self-care,” we sure are bad at resting. We schedule vacations that are more exhausting than our regular lives and take “Sabbath” as an excuse to binge entire seasons of prestige TV in one sitting.

The Bible starts with God creating the world in six days and resting on the seventh—not because he was tired but because he was setting the rhythm. Rest wasn’t an afterthought. It was built into creation itself.

Jesus followed that rhythm too. He regularly stepped away from crowds, left people hanging (yes, really) and took time alone to pray. If the literal Savior of the world wasn’t available 24/7, why do we think we need to be?

Here’s the thing: rest isn’t just good for your soul. It’s good for your brain. Studies show that chronic stress literally rewires your brain, making it harder to focus, regulate emotions, and be productive in the long run.

The world thrives on keeping you busy. Consumerism, capitalism, and even some versions of church culture—there’s always something else to achieve. But choosing rest? That’s countercultural.

So, take a real Sabbath. Put your phone in another room. Go outside. Breathe. Let yourself rest. Because you don’t need to “earn” it. In fact, you were created for it.

“…I believe that for just about everybody the most fulfilling thing we can do, in the long term, is to focus on our work. By “work,” I’m not just referring to a nine-to-five job. It could be parenting. Or serving on a board. Or volunteering. Many possible things. Anything that contributes good to others is work, regardless if we’re getting paid for it.

And what distracts us most from that kind of work? One of the biggest things is work’s opposite: leisure. Or better put modern society’s infatuation with leisure.

…I’m not against rest, relaxation and fun. I just don’t want you to miss out on the things that matter to you because you’ve unthinkingly bought into our cultural notions of leisure. What I’m against is making leisure your objective. Because if leisure is your objective, it will inevitably displace your higher priorities. That’s a very common problem in our society.

Let me put it this way: Leisure make a great booster to long-term productivity in our pursuit of meaningful goals. But leisure makes a terrible goal in itself.

Leisure doesn’t provide meaning. It provides renewal for other things that do provide meaning.

Preaching Angles: Leisure: Mk 6:31, Ex 20:10, Ecc 3:13, Ps 118:24; Work: Col 3:23, Pr 16:3, Gen 2:15, Pr 18:9; Purpose: Jn 6;27, Col 3:17, M 6:33 Source: Joshua Becker, Things That Matter, Waterbrook, 2022, Page 146-147

Che Guevara is known internationally as a Marxist revolutionary. As he recruited for his guerilla operations in Cuba, the Congo, and Bolivia he often encountered the half-heartedness of his volunteers.

Author John Lee Anderson quotes Che’s sarcastic evaluation of the freshly trained recruits who had just arrived to fight in the Congo:

In a ludicrous sideshow, the captain had also brought over forty new Congolese rebel ‘graduates,’ fresh from a training course in the Soviet Union. Like their Bulgarian and Chinese-trained predecessors, they immediately requested two weeks of vacation, while also complaining that they had nowhere to put their luggage. Che wrote, ‘It would be a little comic if it weren’t so sad, to see the disposition of these boys in whom the revolution had deposited its faith.’

Possible Preaching Angle:

The church also faces the same issue with those who are called to follow our Savior. We are not called to be part-time disciples looking for a life of leisure. Jesus calls for us to “take your cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). He also promises to give us immense rewards stored up in heaven for the sacrifices we make for his cause (Matt. 19:29).

Do you ever feel like you’re too busy to enjoy life? If so, that’s because you are probably too busy. Not that this is some amazing diagnosis: Most people are too busy.

According to surveys conducted in recent years by the Pew Research Center, 52 percent of Americans are usually trying to do more than one thing at a time, and 60 percent sometimes feel too busy to enjoy life. When it comes to parents with children under the age of 18, a full 74 percent said that they sometimes feel too busy to enjoy life.

Business consultants are calling it “The 85% rule.” An article in The Wall Street Journal explained how it works:

Are you giving it your all? Maybe that’s too much. So many of us were raised in the gospel of hard work and max effort, taught that what we put in was what we got out. Now, some coaches and corporate leaders have a new message. To be at your best, dial it back a bit.

Trying to run at top speed will actually lead to slower running times, they say, citing fitness research. Lifting heavy weights until you absolutely can’t anymore won’t spark more muscle gain than stopping a little sooner, said one exercise physiologist.

The trick—be it in exercise, or anything—is to try for 85%. Aiming for perfection often makes us feel awful, burns us out and backfires. Instead, count the fact that you hit eight out of 10 of your targets this quarter as a win. We don’t need to see our work, health, or hobbies as binary objectives, perfected or a total failure.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Interestingly, if you truly remember the Sabbath—one day out of seven—that equals 85.7% of your week devoted to work. So, the Sabbath was God’s original 85% rule.

Freelance writer Jason Heller describes how he and his wife made a pact a few years ago:

Every Sunday, we swore to each other, we will abstain from work. We start our morning and end our day by bingeing TV in bed. The door of our apartment is opened only for pizza to be slid inside. Chores go undone. Fitness is spurned. Job-related emails and texts are not read.

Lazy Sunday, as we like to call it, is hardly a revolutionary idea. A weekly time of rest is an ancient staple of several religions. And the five-day workweek has been the standard in the U.S., (but) spillover into non-workdays is common. A 2015 Rand survey found that about half of American employees do work in their free time in order to meet job demands. For many who started working from home during the pandemic, the boundary between labor and leisure has dissolved even further.

We shouldn’t need to actively protect our one day off—but sadly, we do. Rest time can feel indulgent or unnatural. ... The instinct to hustle—whether for success or just survival—is hard to shake. Still, we do need respite—not only from our jobs but from all of the many obligations that crop up in adult life.

Pre-pact, Angie and I often used Sundays to prep for the coming workweek. We thought we were buying time that we could spend later. The problem is that work is a bottomless pit—there’s always more to do. Sometimes, the people we’ve been close to for decades are the very people we tend to take for granted. Taking a break gives Angie and me the opportunity to really see each other again.

That might be the most important reason to pause work: not just to fuel up in preparation for more work later on, but for the sake of the pause itself. Although Angie and I aren’t religious, we really do think of our secular day of rest as sacred; that’s why we take pains to protect it. When you take away all the tasks you might feel pressed to do on a Sunday, what you’re left with isn’t an absence. It’s an opening.

Possible Preaching Angle:

1) Sabbath; Sunday; Rest - Although this article was admittedly written from a secular point of view, and includes excessive time with the TV, the central idea agrees wholeheartedly with Scripture (Exod. 20:8-11; Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 16:2). Obviously, for the believer, Sunday rest would include gathering with the Lord’s people for worship (Heb. 10:24-25), but also taking the rest of the day for rest and recovery from the week. 2) Labor Day – This holiday is a good reminder to return to God’s guidance of taking one day a week off to rest, not just once a year.

A reporter at an alternative newsmagazine has been noticing a particular trend in the Portland, Oregon food scene. Many boutique restaurants, pop-ups, and food truck proprietors are intermittently closing their establishments to take needed times of rest.

According to reporter Jason Cohen, the pandemic has reset expectations in way that created space for such prioritizations of health and wellness. And unlike conventional wisdom, the customer isn’t always right. Cohen found several examples of owners making frank, impromptu social media posts or even posting physical signage explaining the need for sudden, unforeseen closings.

“CLOSED TODAY FOR CATERING. WE ARE NOT SORRY, WE GOTS TO GET THIS WORK WHEN WE CAN,” read a sign at Kim Jong Grillin. The food cart Poppyside said something similar last summer, “Closed August 3 to 6 to recharge and enjoy time with the people I love.”

Restaurant owner Maggie Irwin said, “I feel like post-pandemic, there’s been a much broader conversation around mental health in the workplace. We have so many repeat customers, and a lot of them that came in [after a closure] were like, ‘Hey, we saw your posts and like we’re so happy you guys did that. Like, it means a lot to us that you guys take care of yourself so you keep being in this neighborhood.’”

The article concluded with pensive note of positivity. “In the endless seesaw of work-life balance, consider this a win for life.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Part of being diligent in our discipleship is taking time to rest our bodies, souls, and minds. As John Ortberg says, sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is take a nap.

In May, 1853, Phoebe and her husband Holden Judson joined a covered wagon train near Kansas City hoping to reach Washington Territory by mid-October. This was a distance of more than 2,000 miles over the rough Oregon Trail. Like all wagon trains, they elected a captain. His word was the law. Well, they chose Rev. Gustavus Hines, only to be surprised one Saturday night when he announced the train would never travel on Sundays.

Phoebe was shocked. They had half a continent to cross, at oxen pace (15-20 miles per day on a good trail), with mountain passes and innumerable river crossings ahead of them. She sat in her wagon and just fumed. One family deserted the train and joined another.

On their first Sunday, while they stood still, one train after another passed them by. They started out again on Monday, only to reach their first river cross on Tuesday evening. A long line of wagons stretched out ahead of them, waiting for the single ferry to carry them across. They waited three days. On Saturday they resumed the journey, only to be told they would still rest the whole next day. Phoebe was livid. This made absolutely no sense to her.

Then, a few weeks later she began to see scores of dead oxen, mules, and horses along the trail. They had been driven so relentlessly, they had collapsed and died. She grudgingly admitted that perhaps the animals needed a day of rest.

A few weeks later, she ruefully admitted that maybe the men needed it too, since they walked most of the time. Then she slowly began to notice that as they worshipped, ate, rested, and even played together on Sundays, it had a remarkably beneficial effect upon people’s spirits. There was less grumbling, more cooperation. She even noticed that they seemed to make better time the other six days.

Finally, what totally sold her on the value of the Sabbath happened one Sunday evening. The family that had deserted them came limping into their campsite, humbly asking to rejoin them. She had assumed they were at least a week ahead; in fact, they had fallen behind. Their own wagon train had broken down! Of course, they welcomed them back. And so it happened that they reached their destination in plenty of time, as friends, and out of the 50 head of cattle with which they began, only two were lost.

Nina Rudnick directs a non-profit that used to have her constantly immersed in her work. On a typical day, she’ll herd her 3-year-old son out of bed and to day care before commuting to a nine-hour day at the office. Often, she’s back at her computer after putting him to sleep.

But since the Covid-19 pandemic, life has slowed down. Rudnick no longer rouses her toddler in the morning and rushes to the office in a harried frenzy. She is still working, but productivity in front of a computer is making way for more sentimental moments with her son. She doesn’t want it to change. She says, “I’ve been working so hard for so many hours and lamenting the fact that I’m away from my kid so much. (But in isolation), I’ve had so many incredibly sweet moments with him.”

Across the country, Maggie Connolly has come to a similar conclusion. Her career consumed most aspects of her life. She said, “[B]eing overbooked and busy was really glorified. I didn’t realize until now how unhealthy that was. We really link success with being exhausted with work.”

Now that work is no longer the defining force of her life, she’s asking bigger, existential questions: What are my hobbies? What makes me happy? What are my interests outside of my job? “Isolation,” she says, “has been an experience of waking up and realizing that you’ve spent so much of your time working. Is that really what you want to do with your life?”

Andrew Smart, the author of Autopilot: The Art and Science of Doing Nothing, writes: “What this pandemic shows, though, is that we can stop everything in a moment’s notice. I hope that rather than panic and try to rush back to normalcy, people will reflect on what it is we should leave behind, rather than resume.”

In his book, Paul Gould writes:

The writings of Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Marilynne Robinson are infused with a sacramental theology. Her writing helps us see and savor the divine in the midst of the mundane. In an oft-cited passage, she invites readers to consider the ordinary—in this instance water—from a new vantage point. In her book Gilead, the Congregationalist minister John Ames knows his time on earth is coming to an end, so he writes a series of letters to his young son. Ames shares a memory of an earlier time when he watched a young couple stroll along on a leisure morning:

“The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running. The girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn't. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth.”

“I don't know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.”

Taking the afternoon off for a round of golf or enjoying a beach holiday in a five-star resort were once signs of having "made it." But according to a study from researchers at Harvard, Americans increasingly perceive busy and overworked people as having high status.

The study relied on a number of experiments. First, the researchers combed through social media posts by celebrities and found more than one in ten were about being too busy or "not having a life." In another experiment, a hundred participants were asked to read a fictional letter from a "friend" named Daniel. In one version, he complained about being "crazy busy" and never having time to watch TV. In another, he talked about being relaxed and often watching sports on TV. On a scale of one to seven, participants ranked busy Daniel more than twice as high on a measure of wealth and social status as they ranked leisurely Daniel.

The study also pointed to a number of ads that reflect our value on being hyper-busy. A recent Rolex ad asked: "Checking his watch costs Bill Gates $300 a second. What is your time worth?" And an ad campaign for The Wall Street Journal features celebrities reading the paper with the tagline, "People who don't have time make time to read The Wall Street Journal." In a recent Cadillac ad a middle-aged actor sitting by the pool says, "Why do we work so hard? Other countries, they work, they stroll home, they stop by the café, they take August off. Off! Why aren't we like that? Because we are crazy-driven hard-working believers, that's why!"

The researchers concluded that our new "conspicuous consumption" is no longer about scarce things like jewelry or money or cars. Instead, it's about saying, "'I am the scarce resource, and therefore I am valuable'… Displaying one's busyness at work and lack of leisure time operates as a visible signal of status in the eyes of others."

Recent studies are showing that taking time for silence restores the nervous system, helps sustain energy, and conditions our minds to be more adaptive and responsive to the complex environments in which so many of us now live, work, and lead. Duke Medical School's Imke Kirste found that silence is associated with the development of new cells in the hippocampus, the key brain region associated with learning and memory. Physician Luciano Bernardi found that two-minutes of silence inserted between musical pieces proved more stabilizing to cardiovascular and respiratory systems than even the music categorized as "relaxing."

And a study in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, based on a survey of 43,000 workers, concluded that the disadvantages of noise and distraction associated with open office plans outweighed anticipated, but still unproven, benefits like increasing morale and productivity boosts from unplanned interactions.

Possible Preaching Angles: These physical benefits are impressive, but for Christians there is even a deeper reason for the spiritual discipline of silence—it connects us with God.

The phrase "information overload" was popularized by Alvin Toffler in 1970. "Information overload" is one of the biggest irritations in modern life. There are e-mails to answer, virtual friends to pester, YouTube videos to watch and, back in the physical world, meetings to attend, papers to shuffle, and spouses to appease. A survey by Reuters once found that two-thirds of managers believe that the data deluge has made their jobs less satisfying or hurt their personal relationships. One-third think that it has damaged their health. Another survey suggests that most managers think most of the information they receive is useless.

Commentators have coined a profusion of phrases to describe the anxiety and anomie caused by too much information: "data asphyxiation" (William van Winkle), "data smog" (David Shenk), "information fatigue syndrome" (David Lewis), "cognitive overload" (Eric Schmidt) and "time famine" (Leslie Perlow). Johann Hari, a British journalist, notes that there is a good reason why "wired" means both "connected to the internet" and "high, frantic, unable to concentrate."

In a New York Times article, journalist Alex Stone tells the story of how executives at a Houston airport faced and then solved a cascade of passenger complaints about long waits at the baggage claim. They first decided to hire more baggage handlers, reducing wait times to an industry-beating average of eight minutes. But complaints persisted. This made no sense to the executives until they discovered that, on the average, passengers took just one minute to walk to baggage claim, resulting in a hurry-up-and-wait situation. The walk time was not a problem; the remaining seven empty minutes of staring at the baggage carousel was. So, in a burst of innovation, the executives moved the arrival gates farther away from the baggage claim area. Passengers now had to walk much farther but their bags were often waiting for them when they arrived. Problem solved. The complaints dropped.

For the same article Stone interviewed MIT operations researcher Richard Larson, the world's leading expert on waiting in lines to discover the psychology behind our waiting. What happened at the Houston airport makes for a perfect illustration. According to Larson, the length of our wait is not as important as what we're doing while we wait. "Often the psychology of queuing is more important than the statistics of the wait itself," says Larson. Essentially, we tolerate "occupied time" (for example, walking to baggage claim) far better than "unoccupied time" (such as standing at the baggage carousel). Give us something to do while we wait, and the wait becomes endurable.

This is why, so often, waiting on God feels like unoccupied time to us. We wait, but what is really happening behind the scenes of our life? Is God actually doing anything? Waiting on God implies developing a new perspective of what God is doing while we wait on him.

Srinivasan S. Pillay, a psychiatrist and an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School who studies burnout, surveyed a random sample of 72 senior leaders and found that nearly all of them reported at least some signs of burnout and that all of them noted at least one cause of burnout at work.

The article quoted one chief executive for a multibillion-dollar company who put it this way: "I just felt that no matter what I was doing, I was always getting pulled somewhere else. It seemed like I was always cheating someone—my company, my family, myself. I couldn't truly focus on anything.

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence. The rush and pressures of modern life are a form of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, to succumb to violence ... The frenzy of the activist ... destroys our own inner capacity for peace.

It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

—Thomas Merton

Editor's Note: Note that this was written in the 1960s, well before iPhones, the Internet, Facebook, personal computers, and the proliferation of TVs. Merton may have been underestimating the rush and pressure and "innate violence" of our age.

Half a century ago, an upholsterer from San Francisco made a curious discovery. He was called to a cardiologist's office to reupholster some chairs in the waiting room. When he looked at the furniture, he wondered immediately what was wrong with the patients. Only the front edge of the seats and the first few inches of the armrests were worn out. "People don't wear out chairs this way," he said.

Five years later, in 1959, Drs. Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman began to put the pieces together. They had noticed an odd pattern shared by many of their cardiac patients, a pattern that centered on a "chronic sense of time urgency." Patients showed irritability at being made to wait in line, had difficulty relaxing, and were anxious over delays. Obsessed with not wasting a moment, they spoke quickly, interrupted often, hurried those around them, and were forever rushing. Hence the waiting room chairs: the patients sat on the edge of their seats, nervously fidgeting at the arms of the chairs as they watched time tick by.

The cardiologists called the new disease "hurry sickness."

According to Friedman, hurry sickness "arises from an insatiable desire to accomplish too much or take part in too many events in the amount of time available." The hurry-sick person is unable to acknowledge that he can do only a finite number of things. "As a consequence, he never ceases trying to 'stuff' more and more events in his constantly shrinking reserves of time."

In 1974 Colonel William Pogue became the first American to go on strike—in space. The astronaut was part of the last, and longest, manned mission aboard the Skylab space station. About halfway through the 84-day mission, Colonel Pogue and the other astronauts requested ground controllers adjust the work schedule for more rest. "We had been over-scheduled," Pogue said. "We were just hustling the whole day. The work could be tiresome and tedious, though the view as spectacular."

Ground control refused. The work was too important, they said, and time was limited. Some worried the astronauts' request was a sign of depression or physical illness. Pogue insisted neither was the case. They just wanted more time to look out the window and think, he said. Eventually the disagreement between the crew and the controllers became so intense the astronauts went on strike. Finally, a compromise was reached to give the crew more time to rest during the remaining six weeks of the flight. Pogue later wrote that having more time to look out the window at the sun and earth below also made him reflect more about himself, his crewmen, and their "human situation, instead of trying to operate like a machine."

Researchers from the University of Missouri wanted to know how subjects behaved when parted from their iPhones, so they recruited 208 students for a survey on "media usage." The researchers used the survey to screen for iPhone users and eventually recruited a group of 41 respondents for an experiment in cell phone separation anxiety. During the study, participants were placed in a cubicle and asked to perform word search puzzles. Researchers monitored their anxiety levels, heart rate, and blood pressure while the subjects had their iPhones with them.

Then, the real experiment began. Researchers told participants that their iPhones were causing interference with the blood pressure cuff and asked them to move their phones. The phones were placed in a nearby cubicle close by. Next, the researchers called the subjects' phones while they were working on the puzzle. Immediately afterwards, they collected the same data.

The results changed dramatically. Not only did the participants' puzzle performance decline significantly while the phones were off-limits, but their anxiety levels, blood pressure and heart rates skyrocketed. One of the researchers concluded, "iPhones are capable of becoming an extension of selves such as that when separated, we experience a lessing of 'self' and a negative physiological state."

Life for a medieval peasant was no picnic. His life was shadowed by fear of famine, disease, and bursts of warfare. But you might envy him for one thing: his vacation time. The Church often enforced mandatory holidays for weddings, wakes, and births. And then when wandering jugglers or sporting events came to town, peasants got more time off for quaffing beer and celebrating. In fact, economist Juliet Shor found that during periods of particularly high wages, such as 14th century England, peasants might get half the year off. Shor writes, "The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure."

In contrast, life in 21st century America doesn't look near as relaxed or leisurely. The United States is the only advanced country with no national vacation policy whatsoever. Many American workers must keep on working through public holidays, and vacation days often go unused. On average, U.S. workers end up with roughly 16 paid holiday and vacation days in a year, but that number wouldn't meet the legal minimum in most other developed countries around the world.

Possible Preaching Angles: This illustration shows our need to find balance, celebrate the Sabbath, and enjoy time with God and others—perhaps especially during holiday weekends, like Thanksgiving Day.