Sabbath

Jacob deGrom was the best pitcher in the world, right until the moment his elbow finally snapped.Right before his 35th birthday, he underwent Tommy John surgery for the second time, a fate that is often a death sentence for a major-league pitcher.

But surprisingly, deGrom found his way back by pitching a little slower, not faster. In 2025, DeGrom’s fastball velocity has averaged 97 mph in 2025—still plenty fast, but no longer at the top of the leaderboard. He has yet to throw a pitch at 100 mph, something he has done 318 times before.
This isn’t an accident. Research has shown that the unending pursuit of velocity is likely the biggest driver of the arm injury epidemic that has plagued baseball over the past decade. The best way to reverse the trend, doctors say, is for pitchers to move away from the “maximum effort” style in favor of a more measured approach that prioritizes location.

Which is exactly what deGrom is doing. His manager described deGrom’s new approach as “a concerted effort to probably dial it down just a touch.” deGrom isn’t relying on power the way he once did. He’s throwing his changeup more often than he has since 2020. He has reintroduced his curveball, a pitch he had largely abandoned earlier in his career. And when he does turn to his fastball, it is 2 mph slower than he has thrown it in the past.

Keywords: Sabbath, Rest, Priorities, Busyness

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.

An accountant who fills out spreadsheets at the beach, a dog groomer who always has time for one more client, a basketball player who shoots free throws to the point of exhaustion.

Every profession has its share of hard chargers and overachievers. But for some workers — perhaps more than ever in our always-on, always-connected world — the drive to send one more email, clip one more poodle, sink one more shot becomes all-consuming.

Workaholism is a common feature of the modern workplace. A recent review found that roughly 15 percent of workers qualify as workaholics. That adds up to millions of overextended employees around the world who don’t know when — or how, or why — to quit.

Workaholism could be on the upswing thanks to Zoom, Slack and every other technological advance that makes it easier for people to work anywhere, anytime. Behavioral scientist Toon Taris says. “It is something I’m worried about. The conditions for workaholism to develop have never been as good as today.”

Psychologist Malissa Clark agrees that the stage seems to be set for more people to find their inner workaholics. She said, “The mass shift to working from home and remote work may have changed some of our communication patterns and expectations.” Working from home, which became especially widespread during the pandemic, likely created a new group of always-on workers who lost all sight of the boundaries between work and home life. It’s troubling, she says. “Even just your average worker might now start to be more of a workaholic.”

Jack Hassell, a human resource specialist in New Zealand, interviewed an academic who got a wake-up call during the massive Christchurch earthquake of 2011. When the earthquake started, they were reluctant to quit work and leave their desk, Hassell says. Finally forced to exit the shaking building, the academic had an epiphany. “They realized, ‘Oh my God, I was so consumed with work I was willing to almost die.’”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Part of the curse (Gen. 3:19) introduced toil and effort into our lives. Yet, God never meant for us to become slaves to our work. In fact, He insists that we take a day of rest for every six days we labor (Exod. 20:8-11; Luke 23:56).

You know how it is. Saturday is a blissful day. You get some exercise. Do chores around the house. Spend time with family, friends, and/or pets. You go out Saturday night. And then, it’s Sunday morning. And you know that Sunday leads inevitably to Monday. And on Monday that to-do list will rear its head again. Suddenly, you want to bury your head under your pillow and hope it all goes away.

The cloud of dread hanging over you on Sunday evening; the wave of anxious anticipation you feel ahead of a new week; the cold sweat you get thinking about Monday. These feelings have a name: the “Sunday scaries.” From worry to being overwhelmed to straight-up sadness, these feelings are depressingly common. Several factors are thought to cause the Sunday scaries such as economic uncertainty, burnout, fear of losing a job, and reflection on whether working so hard at a job is worthwhile.

LinkedIn surveyed 2,000 U.S. workers and found that 75% experience Sunday scaries. And while it may seem like workers have long-dreaded the end of the weekend, LinkedIn’s research suggests that the extent to which workers currently experience the Sunday scaries is on the rise.

Billy Collins, the former poet Laurette of the United States, was recently asked by The New York Times Book Review, "How has the internet changed your writing?" Collins responded:

The internet asks us to speed up. Poetry invites us to slow down. I write with a pencil and paper, then use the computer only as a fancy typewriter. So, no change really, except in [the internet’s] role as the most persistent distraction in human history.

Possible Preaching Angles:

(1) Distractions; Prayer—Of course there are many other distractions that can keep us from slowing down and being with God. (2) Bible reading and meditation—The Bible also invites us to slow down and listen to God speaking to us.

Pollution. When you hear that word what do you think of? Perhaps dangerous gases are being emitted into our atmosphere. Garbage floating around the ocean. Sick animals due to toxic food. But there's another pollutant lurking in our society. An invisible one that we encounter every single day. Information. It's in our phones, televisions, text chains, and email threads. It's packed into devices we wear on our wrists and in the checkout lines at the grocery store.

In our modern society, escaping the barrage of information is impossible. But are we equipped to handle it? In a 2024 letter published in Nature Human Behavior, scientists argued that we should treat this information overload like environmental pollution. It may not affect our drinking water, but it affects our brains at every turn.

The brain is the most complex organ in the body. But the brain can only process a certain amount of information. When we exceed that peak level, it can almost feel like our brain is filled to the brink and totally frozen, incapable of performing its most basic duties that help us get through our days.

When we reach that point of paralysis, we can't process and act on the information we consume. If this is feeling familiar, you're not alone. According to the Real Time Statistics Project, as of January 2023, there were nearly 2 billion websites on the internet. 175 million tweets were sent every day, and 30 billion pieces of content were shared monthly on Facebook. How was it possible to not get distracted by all that information?

Of course, technology is useful. We can look up healthy recipes or determine if a headache is just a headache or something more problematic. But because of modern technology, we're all slaves to the amount of information we can consume. The American Psychological Association defines information overload as the state when the intensity of information exceeds an individual's processing capacity, leading to anxiety, poor decision-making, and other undesirable consequences.

Have you ever wondered what happens in your brain while you sleep? A good night's sleep does more than just help you feel rested; it might literally clear your mind.

A study published in the journal Cell shows how deep sleep may wash away waste buildup in the brain during waking hours, an essential process for maintaining brain health. According to one researcher, “It’s like turning on the dishwasher before you go to bed and waking up with a clean brain.”

Research sheds light on how deep sleep plays a crucial role in “cleaning” the brain by flushing out waste products that accumulate during waking hours. This process, known as glymphatic clearance, is driven by the brain’s glymphatic system to remove toxic proteins associated with neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.

The study identified norepinephrine, a molecule released during deep sleep, as a key player in this process. Researchers observed in mice that norepinephrine waves occur roughly every 50 seconds, causing blood vessels to contract and create rhythmic pulsations. These pulsations act as a pump, propelling brain fluid to wash away waste.

These findings, which likely apply to humans, highlight the importance of high-quality, natural sleep for maintaining cognitive health. Poor sleep may disrupt waste clearance, potentially increasing the risk of neurological disorders. Researchers noted that understanding these mechanisms can help people make informed decisions about their sleep and overall brain health.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Sleep is a precious gift from God, reminding us of the importance of rest in our lives. By modeling rest himself, God teaches us that taking time to recharge is necessary. Renewing our minds is crucial, and rest allows us to do just that—refreshing our thoughts and rejuvenating our spirit.

Religious and non-religious people alike think that many people are living shallow and superficial lives. They have noticed that many are rushing through life at break-neck speeds, with little regard or thought to what they are doing. Author Pete Davis explores this issue by going back to 1986 and the improbable opening of a McDonald's restaurant in Italy:

When the burger chain opened in the Piazza di Spagna, one of the most famous squares in Rome, an outcry erupted across Italy. Thousands rallied to protest what Italians saw as the desecration of a historic center by a symbol of shallow consumerism. One of the chain's opponents, Italian journalist Carlo Petrini, thought sign and angry chants were not enough to convey the depth of the protest's message. So, he went to the square and handed out bowls of pasta, a symbol of Italy's deep culinary tradition. Petrini and his compatriots shouted: “We don't want fast food. We want slow food.”

Thus, the International Slow Food movement was born, advocating not just for local cuisines but "slow and prolonged enjoyment.” The Slow Food movement spread around the world. It was perfectly timed for an era when people were beginning to notice the downsides of the global forces that had been prioritizing quantity over quality, spectacle over depth, and the fast over the slow. It felt bigger than food. It was a whole different mindset than that being served up by the global corporations of the day.

Davis ends the segment by quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson and elaborates:

“In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.” When there's not much underneath the surface of our superficial routines, best to move fast to distract ourselves from our shallowness. When we force ourselves to move slow again, as the Slow movement calls us to do, we confront it. The confrontation can be terrifying. But as we move through it, we can begin to rediscover depth.

Brooklyn residents were in mourning in late October after a leaky fire hydrant was paved over by city workers. Over the previous summer, leaks from the hydrant had filled a small enclosure around the hydrant with water. Residents responded by adding goldfish and other bits of aquatic décor, painting goldfish onto a nearby light pole, and creating a seating area to view the fish.

Neighbors called it The Bed-Stuy Aquarium, referencing the name of the neighborhood known as Bedford-Stuyvesant. The pond became something of a tourist attraction after it became searchable as a location on Google Maps, and people from as far away as California flocked to it to take photos in front of the trending destination.

The unofficial aquarium was destined to be short-lived, because the fire department needed to make sure the hydrant remained in working order and didn’t freeze over the winter. Area resident Sofia Talavera said, “People actually took their time and their money to make it beautiful. This was literally the community coming together.” Talavera particularly enjoyed the aquarium as a late-night hangout spot. After the New York Liberty won the WNBA Finals, she posted a grainy image to Instagram with the caption “last night was so awesome I had to go to the aquarium to celebrate.”

The Department of Environmental Protection said in a statement that it was “looking forward to working with community members to find an appropriate alternative location for this impromptu gem,” adding that the goldfish were rescued and available for a new home.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Community Impact; Fellowship - While community safety is an important value to uphold, God’s people can promote mutual flourishing by adding value to the common good and creating opportunities for celebration for people. 2) Beauty; Creativity; Encouragement – It’s important to look for opportunities to add beauty and a moment for contemplation into people’s busy lives.

There is a reason God gave us the Sabbath rest. We need it. We were not created to work seven days a week. Yet, that is where we are headed as a culture, especially since COVID-19, and this is not a good thing.

Technology tethers us to our work through smartphones and “productivity” apps such as Slack and Teams. The majority of workers regularly check their email on their smartphones, which never leave their side, even after work hours or on vacation. The rise in remote work means work and family spheres are no longer separate, blurring the boundaries between work and home. Or as Andrew Barnes, cofounder of 4 Day Week Global, said, “We’re not working from home, we’re sleeping in the office.” This is our new world of work.

Our relationship with work is becoming increasingly unhealthy. Levels of burnout and stress are at all-time highs. Even before the pandemic, the World Health Organization called stress the “health epidemic of the 21st century.” What is a major source of that stress? Our jobs.

COVID-19 exacerbated this problem. During the pandemic, workdays became longer—in the United States, the average workday is now three hours longer; and in the United Kingdom, France, Canada, and Spain, it’s two hours longer. But more than that, we have gotten used to working outside traditional work hours.

Eric Liddell took his starting spot in the finals for the 400 meters. More than 6,000 paying spectators filled the stadium on that warm Friday night in Paris, a century ago, when the starting pistol fired and the Scottish runner took off from the outside lane.

And 47.6 seconds later, Liddell had set a new world record, leaving his competitors in awe and his fans grasping to make sense of what they had just witnessed.

Liddell’s sprint at the 1924 Paris Olympics is a canon event in the history of Christian athletes, and not just because of what happened on the track. Liddell entered the 400-meter race only after learning that the heats for his best Olympic event, the 100 meters, would fall on a Sunday. He withdrew from that event, holding fast to his Christian convictions about observing the Sabbath.

Some admired his convictions, while others saw him as disloyal and unpatriotic. Many could not comprehend his inflexible stand. It was just one Sunday, and at a time when Sabbath practices in the English-speaking world were rapidly changing. Besides, the event itself would not happen until the afternoon, giving Liddell plenty of time to attend church services in the morning. Why give up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring honor to himself and his country? Liddell recognized that the world was changing. But the Sabbath, as he understood and practiced it, was to be a full day of worship and rest. It was, for him, a matter of personal integrity and Christian obedience.

Liddell’s performance in 1924 lingers because it was caught up in cultural narratives about what it means to be a Christian athlete and, by extension, what it means to be a Christian in a changing world.

His story inspired the 1982 Oscar-winning movie Chariots of Fire, which brought his accomplishments back into the spotlight and led to numerous inspirational biographies focused on his Christian legacy.

News of Liddell’s achievement quickly spread back home through the press and the radio. He arrived in Scotland as a conquering hero; those who had criticized his Sabbath convictions now praised him for his principled stand. He spent the next year traveling throughout Great Britain on an evangelistic campaign, preaching a simple and direct message. “In Jesus Christ you will find a leader worthy of all your devotion and mine,” he told the crowds.

Then, in 1925, he departed for China, spending the rest of his life in missionary service before dying in 1945 of a brain tumor at age 43.

And as the Olympics return to Paris this summer, Liddell’s name is part of the centennial commemorations.

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.

If you’re waking up feeling more exhausted than when you fell asleep, you’re not alone. According to new research, the average American wakes up feeling well-rested only three mornings out of the week. The survey of 2,000 U.S. adults reports that the average person doesn’t get anywhere near the quality or amount of sleep they want.

On average, Americans only get six hours of sleep on any given night, while a majority aspire to get eight or more in the new year (58%). Parents in particular claim to struggle with nighttime routines. Thirty-five percent of respondents who are parents say their nighttime routine suffers, with a similar percentage of parents sharing that they have trouble winding down before bed most of the week (34%).

It’s not just parents, however, as two in three Americans (66%) report that they need a full two hours or more to wind down before being able to fall asleep. Respondents from the Northeast (38%) and “night people” (53%) are most likely to struggle with winding down.

One icy night in March 2010, 100 marketing experts piled into the Sea Horse Restaurant in Helsinki. They had the modest goal of making a remote and medium-sized country a world-famous tourist destination. The problem was that Finland was known as a rather quiet country, and the Country Brand Delegation had been looking for a national brand that would make some noise.

The experts puzzled over the various strengths of their nation. Here was a country with exceptional teachers, an abundance of wild berries and mushrooms, and a vibrant cultural capital the size of Nashville, Tennessee. These things fell a bit short of a compelling national identity. Someone proposed that perhaps quiet wasn’t such a bad thing. That got them thinking.

A few months later, the delegation issued a slick “Country Brand Report.” It highlighted a host of marketable themes, (but) one key theme was brand new: silence. As the report explained, modern society often seems intolerably loud and busy. “Silence is a resource,” it said. It could be marketed just like clean water or berries. “In the future, people will be prepared to pay for the experience of silence.”

People already do. In a loud world, silence sells. Noise-canceling headphones retail for hundreds of dollars; the cost of some weeklong silent meditation courses can run into the thousands. Finland saw that it was possible to quite literally make something out of nothing.

The next year, the Finnish Tourist Board released a series of photographs of lone figures in the wilderness, with the caption “Silence, Please.” Eva Kiviranta, who manages social media for VisitFinland.com, explains “We decided, instead of saying that it’s really empty and really quiet and nobody is talking about anything here, let’s embrace it and make it a good thing.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

The Bible also emphasizes the need for occasional restful silence in our pursuit of God. Prayer (Luke 5:16), seeking God’s will before making decisions (Luke 6:12), and rest from a busy ministry (Mark 6:31) all led Jesus to model withdrawal to quiet places (Matt. 14:13).

Miwa Sado, a reporter for NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster, “died in the line of duty and her body was found with her mobile phone still clasped in her hand.” Doctors soon established that Miwa Sado died as a result of congenital heart failure. But following an investigation by Japan’s Ministry of Labor, the official cause of here death was changed to “karoshi”: death by overwork.

In the month preceding her death, Sado had clocked an exhausting 159 hours of official overtime. That was equivalent to working two full eight-hour shifts every weekday over a four-week period. Unofficially, the number of hours of overtime probably exceeded that.

For the last few decades, the world has watched as China became the world’s largest producer and exporter of manufactured goods. But one of the unintended consequences of this has been a surge in the number of people whose deaths have been attributed to overwork. In 2016, CCTV, the state broadcaster, which usually only resorts to hyperbole when they have good news to share, announced that more than half a million Chinese citizens die from overworking every year.

Many in China’s high technology sector now order their working lives according to the mantra “996.” The two 9s refer to the requirements to put in twelve-hour days, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., and the 6 refers to the six days of the week that employees with ambitions to get anywhere are expected to be at their workstations.

Possible Preaching Angle:

There are so many people who overwork their entire lives. They may not suddenly die as poor Miwa did, but over the course of their lives, they do eventually work themselves “into” death by fixating on the wrong goal, and putting temporary gains over eternal rewards.

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.

For five years in a row, Finland has ranked No. 1 as the happiest country in the world, according to the World Happiness Report. A Finnish philosopher and psychology researcher who studies the fundamentals of happiness, was asked: What exactly makes people in Finland so exceptionally satisfied with their lives? He answered, “To maintain a high quality of life, here are three things we never do”:

1. We Don’t Compare Ourselves to Our Neighbors.

There’s a famous line by a Finnish poet: “Don’t compare or brag about your happiness.” Finns really take this to heart, especially when it comes to material things and overt displays of wealth. I once ran into one of the wealthiest man in Finland. He was pushing his toddler in a stroller towards the tram station. He could have bought himself an expensive car or hire a driver, but he opted for public transportation. That’s what success looks like in Finland: Just like everyone else.

2. We Don’t Overlook the Benefits of Nature.

According to a 2021 survey, 87% of Finns feel that nature is important to them because it provides them with peace of mind, energy, and relaxation. In Finland, employees are entitled to four weeks of summer holiday. Many of them use that time to hit the countryside and immerse themselves in nature. Spending time in nature increases vitality, well-being, and a gives a sense of personal growth.

3. We Don’t Break the Community Circle of Trust.

Research shows that the higher the levels of trust within a country, the happier its citizens are. Finnish people tend to trust each other and value honesty. If you forget your laptop in a library or lost your phone on the train, you can be quite confident you’ll get it back. Kids also often take a public bus home from school and play outside without supervision.

Possible Preaching Angles:

This illustration could also be titled, “3 Things People in the Happiest Churches Do.” It is instructive that each of the three points matches with scriptural values for relationships between church members: 1. We don’t compare ourselves to our neighbors: (Matt. 7:1-5; 2 Cor. 10:12, Gal. 5:26; Gal. 6:4); 2. We don’t overlook the benefits of nature: (Psa. 1:2; Mark 6:31; Phil. 4:8; Heb. 4:9-10); 3. We don’t break the community circle of trust: (Acts 2:42, 1 Tim. 5:13; Heb. 10:24-25; Jam. 1:26; 1 Pet. 2:1, 2 Cor 12:20)

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.