Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Work six days and do everything you do. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to GOD, you God. Don’t do any work – not you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your servant, nor your maid, nor your animals, not even the foreign guest visiting in your town. For in six days GOD made Heaven, Earth, and Sea, and everything in them; he rested on the seventh day. Therefore GOD blessed the Sabbath day; he set it apart as a holy day. (Exodus 20.8-11, from The Message)

Then Jesus said, “The Sabbath was made to serve us; we weren’t made to serve the Sabbath.” (Mark 2.27, from The Message)

Today is Sunday, traditionally the holy day of the week for most Christians. Yesterday was a holy day for Jews. Different days, same purpose to rest and keep the day holy. There is always some debate going on about which day we should be keeping holy, but all the while we aren’t treating any day of the week any differently than the others. They all mean work for us.

The Bible shows us a different example: According to the Bible, even God rested after having created the world. It’s like God himself was saying that life shouldn’t be all about work and that while there is a time and place for doing everything you need to do, there is also a time for relaxing and not working.

Keep the Sabbath day holy

Last year Mari and I spent quite a lot of time working and studying. Mari was writing her Master’s Thesis so it was not uncommon for us to spend the whole weekend sitting around the kitchen table and working. While she was reading articles about working memory, I was working on my programming assignments.

It wasn’t until yesterday that we realized how different life is now.

After Oiva was born about two and a half months ago our weekends have become different: we spend our time taking care of Oiva, taking long walks and just not doing anything special.

And you sure can feel the difference.

Even though taking care of a baby can be hard “work” from time to time, the fact that we don’t work on weekends has made us more relaxed and much faster to notice all the blessings around us.

So, if you can, I suggest you do your best to keep at least one day in the week as your Sabbath day. Don’t be too picky on the day, just choose the one that best fits your schedule. It really doesn’t have to be Saturday (or Sunday) – any day is fine. Actually if you want to be on the safe side of all kinds of debates, keep both Saturday and Sunday as your holy days, days designated for relaxing.

Have a mini Sabbath every day

But we can go further. If God needed one day to rest from all his work, don’t we, mere humans, need more? Keeping in mind that God doesn’t see time the way we do we could replace the word “days” with “hours“:

Work six hours and do everything you do. But the seventh hour is a Sabbath to GOD, you God. Don’t do any work…

I know I shouldn’t be changing anything in the Bible, but think of this just as an experiment: if the commandment would speak of hours instead of days (and you would follow the commandment), how would that affect your life?

Again here the point is not in how many hours you actually work, but in the fact that you reserve some time every day for relaxing and having your daily mini Sabbath.

When I come home from work around 3 PM I usually spend at least an hour holding Oiva, chatting with Mari and just not thinking about any of my work. Later in the evening I may spend some time working on this blog, but that’s it. Having gotten my mini Sabbath, the next morning I am ready to go and get my daily dose of work.

I could easily work long hours and after coming home start working on my business ventures, studies or any of the things that I have in mind. But I know that that would just burn me out, so I want to dedicate some time for just relaxing.

And it’s not only good for me.

The time I spend relaxing is important for my family as well: If I would be working all the time, I wouldn’t get to know my son, I would lose contact with my wife and slowly I would become more and more irritable which would make me hard to approach. And that would in the end be really bad for everyone around me.

I suggest you take this seriously and make a commitment of having an at least a short one hour mini Sabbath every day (the longer you can make your Sabbath, the better). Go say hi to your kids, read a good book, watch a movie, write a note in your diary, go out and take a long walk looking at the rising sun. Relax.

Sneak preview: Tomorrow, August 6th, I will be doing my first guest appearance by blogging at The Ongoing Autobiography of a Young Capitalist, a blog about online entrepreneurship maintained by Graham Lutz. At this spot on my blog you’ll see a post written by Graham.