Sabbath Rhythm: Week Six

"SABBATH RHYTHM is practicing the weekly HABIT of receiving the GIFT of God to CEASE from that which is necessary--work and to EMBRACE that which is essential--rest, reflection and relationships (God, self, and others) for the purpose of SELF-CARE."

Well, it is week six in our six week Sabbath experience. During these six weeks, we have focused on my definition of a Sabbath Rhythm for self-care. I hope you have enjoyed the readings from this blog and pray they were an encouragement to you to live well in all of your relationships. After this week, I'll be sending out some assessments which I'll need back from you quickly while the experience is fresh in your mind.

This week we are focusing on what is the BULLS EYE for me in this project and that is SELF-CARE. It is my theological assumption that SABBATH is a divine rhythm for our well-being found in God. Sabbath provides us the divine resources to adequately address STRESS and BURNOUT. I have reprinted a Sabbath blog below for your consideration. Grace and Peace.

Stress and Sabbath Keeping

by Arden Mahlberg

Let's suppose what I hope is true, that you have pretty good self-care. You take regular rest breaks, get regular exercise and eat healthily. Then, for some reason, you are under considerably more stress than usual. What will happen to your self-care? Often, if you are like most of us, it will decline, even at the time that we need it most. We don't have the energy to exercise, forgetting that even a brief walk will actually improve our energy. Stress narrows our perception and makes our thinking much more short term. We want to conserve energy by inactivity rather than exert some energy in order to gain more. We may believe that we don't have the time to rest or for exercise because of all we have to do, forgetting that the exercise and effective rest will restore our energy and mental clarity. Our eating becomes more short term, moving more toward quick energy foods high in carbohydrates and fats. Such eating does bring short term comfort and an energy boost, but actually undermines our capacity to handle stress in the long term, even a few hours from now. So when we listen to stress, it gets us to do things that are not helpful. In fact, that can take us on a downward spiral. Shutting down in front of the TV is not restorative.

Stress is basically the perception that the situation we are facing is greater than the resources we have to deal with them resources such as time, energy, ability and help from others. This is what we mean by being overwhelmed. Sometimes that perception is inaccurate, of course, and stress itself is actually a source of that misperception. So the first thing we need to do is check the accuracy of our perceptions (Reflection as a Sabbath value is helpful here). The situation may not be as bad as we think it is and our resources for dealing with it may be greater than we suppose. What we seek is to have a relative balance between the challenges of the situation and our resources. We are really at out best when we are challenged but feel we have a pretty good chance of success.

If our perceptions are accurate and the demands are greater than our resources, we have two choices, either reduce the demands, like getting rid of some obligations, or increase our resources, like energy, knowledge or help from others. Sabbath rest improves stress in two ways. First, it reduces the demands of the situation. For the Sabbath period, we have no demands on us as long as we have the ability to mentally let go of unfinished tasks. As Barbara Taylor says, in Sabbath we rest as if our work is done. Secondly, Sabbath reduces stress by increasing our resources, particularly energy. It can also help us realize that we are not alone in facing our challenges, God is with us, and there are other resources outside ourselves that can help, something we can lose site of under the constriction of stress.

There is another kind of stress besides being overwhelmed. It turns out that people show signs of stress when they are under challenged, that their abilities are greater than what their responsibilities call for. We see this in people whose jobs are not adequately challenging, for example, or full time parents who have important parts of themselves that have no outlet. In these cases, Sabbath reduces stress by giving us freedom from our responsibilities so we have time to do things that do more fully use our abilities, like hobbies or other interests. We are all far more complex than our jobs make use of, and we suffer when we don't give ourselves other outlets for our abilities.

While Sabbath rest from our responsibilities reduces stress and restores us physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, stress itself can work against our Sabbath keeping by trying to convince us that we don't have time for it. Getting more tasks done, for example, rather than resting, reduces perceived stress by checking one more thing of the to-do list. It can feel like keeping working late into the night reduces stress in the same way, even though it results in less sleep and therefore reduced stress capacity tomorrow. But as Dorothy Bass quotes a friend, "Show me a person who can't get their work done in 6 days and Ill show you a someone who can't get their work done in 7 days." The ongoing strategy of reducing stress by getting one more task done can be a trap.

So we can't let ourselves lose site of the big picture when we are under stress. Taking Sabbath rest will reduce our stress both in the short term and in the long term, unlike the answers stress itself tries to get us to believe. Martin Luther kept such awareness of the big picture that when he was facing a particularly difficult day, he would arise earlier than usual so he had more time for prayer. He was correcting his perception of the situation and increasing his resources.

2007 Arden Mahlberg, PhD. All rights reserved.