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Sabbath Ep. 7 | 7 Sabbath Principals · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:01
  Hi, welcome to the Family Teams Podcast. Our goal here is to help your family become a multi-generational team on mission by providing you with biblically rooted concepts, tools, and rhythms. Your hosts are Jeremy Pryor and Jefferson Bethke, and this season is all about crafting a family-friendly day of rest.
• 0:19
  We'll talk about the biblical idea of Sabbath, hear testimonies from different families, and also discuss practical ways to do this with kids. Make sure you give us a follow so you don't miss out on future episodes.
• 0:35
  We're so excited that you all have come along with us on this whole season of how to have a effective restful Shabbat with littles. And so what we want to do in this very last episode is to think through what are the main principles for resting with littles?
• 0:51
  What are the seven principles that are most important to catch? Some of these were emphasized in various interviews that you guys have heard. I want to go back through them explicitly and just kind of tease them out one at a time. We want to make sure that this is really, really working for you guys because we know this is a huge area that a lot of you guys really want to dive into. We want to make sure that
• 1:09
  It's as successful for your family as possible. So what are the seven different ways that we want to think about? What are these principles that are really important when trying to rest with littles? The first one is stay one team. And by that I mean you and your spouse need to really think about rest and be talking about it together and want what is best for each other. I love the definition of love that says simply, I want what is best for you. And so part of what you want to say to each other is I want you,
• 1:39
  to get a full day of rest. You want to be able to say that to each other so that as you guys are thinking through these various tactics and you're experimenting and really working through various attempts at rest and Sabbathing, that you experience a love for one another and not the tension of, oh, you're getting what you need and I'm not getting what I need. We really want to start by just saying a principle is stay one team, work with each other. There'll be times where we'll be able to get a full day of rest.
• 2:08
  One of you will feel like you're getting a lot of traction and the other one is not. Please celebrate, you know, whatever traction is being made, but also make sure that you are paying very close attention to, oh man, I think this is not working out as well for you. How do we make this work? And so stay one team in that sense. Stay one team in that you are really rooting for each other. There's no competition.
• 2:27
  that we want to see created in trying to figure out how to do a full day of rest. Love is fully wanting the best for the other person. Okay, number two, I think one of the things that you'll notice that when you're trying to rest with littles is that you wanna embrace physical symbols. Make it physical.
• 2:43
  Any way that you can involve the senses, smell, places, sounds, you want to think through what those symbols can be because kids are very concrete. And one of the things I love about thinking about Sabbath with littles is that oftentimes where a lot of parents experience is when they really serve their children well by creating symbols where their kids really get the Sabbath, they get it at a very deep level. I don't know if you guys have ever been to a church service where they have a children's sermon and then all the kids come up front
• 3:13
  and then the pastor or some person gets up there and describes things in such basic language. You're like, oh, I finally get it now. I mean, that's the way that Sabbath oftentimes needs to be, in that as your kids really start to understand the meaning of rest, because you've made it so concrete, your soul will start to really understand the meaning of rest.
• 3:33
  And so if that's a candle or a certain scent, certain foods that you wanna have or separate just for the Sabbath, certain places that you only go on the Sabbath, certain sounds or lack of sounds, how do you break up
• 3:48
  the normal things that you do during the week so that it feels more peaceful, it feels more restful, and that your kids really can experience and enter into that. Even while they're young, they really feel or sense something is different about today. It smells different. It looks different. It feels different. Those are really powerful things. So embrace physical symbols. Number two, make it physical.
• 4:12
  Okay, number three is experiment and repeat. So many of the things that we've learned about the Sabbath are things we did on accident and then realized, oh wow, that actually worked really well. I felt really restful because of that one particular thing. Let's do that again, let's do that again. And so you want to give yourself, especially in the first six months of really trying to understand how to do a Sabbath, lots of freedom to experiment.
• 4:35
  Try lots of different things. What happens if we do this in the morning and this in the afternoon and this in the evening? Okay, what if we take that thing we do in the evening and do it in the morning? What happens if we take that thing that we do in the afternoon and do it in the evening? Like what happens if we go to this place instead of that place? What happens if we say yes to things? What happens when we say no to things? Like really try to give yourself the freedom to experiment. And if it really felt unrestful,
• 4:56
  learn and try not to do that again. And if something really felt restful or really fit into the flow of the Sabbath, then simply repeat those things. And so experiment and repeat is a real basic principle that really helps. Number four is shake up the dynamic. So what you wanna do, and this is part of really learning to experiment, is oftentimes a dynamic might look different in that some people try, get really fixated on, we all need to be together as a family on the Sabbath.
• 5:24
  The Sabbath is a one day a week that we can be together, so we all need to be together all the time. Now I think that the principle that oftentimes people are experiencing in that is that they want to feel connected to one another. But sometimes saying we gotta be together for 10, 12 hours straight is a dynamic that actually doesn't produce the kind of restfulness or the kind of connection that people really are looking for. It's that sometimes what we've tried to do and what a lot of families have tried to do is just shake up the dynamic, okay,
• 5:53
  When is it during the Sabbath where people get to be alone? When is it during the Sabbath where maybe we do one-on-one time? When is it during the Sabbath where the husband takes the kids or the wife takes the kids? When is it during the Sabbath that we do stay together? And we say, no, no, during this three hours or this part of the Sabbath, we're going to really stay together and here are some things we're going to try to do to make that dynamic really effective for rest or sustainable in the future.
• 6:19
  And so having these overarching rules that we all need to stay together, or because I'm an introvert, I need to be alone the entire day, like these kinds of one dimensional dynamics, I think I've seen really don't necessarily create a lot of rest. And so, but what's maybe a little bit counterintuitive is just to constantly be shaking up the dynamic until you find those,
• 6:39
  those dynamics that really do work for rest and work for the family and do allow you to connect and be together. And so we want to be okay with really thinking through what those dynamics could be. So that's the fourth one.
• 6:51
  Number five, patterns over schedules. Patterns over schedules. One of the things that's really tough for me, what hasn't been really hard for me to understand about the Sabbath, is that oftentimes, I've noticed that if I do certain things in the morning, and certain things in the afternoon, and certain things in the evening, I get really, really well rested. But one of the problems is I feel like, am I just living into another schedule on the Sabbath? That's kind of what a work day feels like. But one of the things I've learned is the difference
• 7:18
  is that I like to have patterns in my Shabbat, but when I have a schedule, like if I have to be someplace at 10 a.m., I have to be someplace at 2 p.m., if it's really, really fixed, that can be a little disruptive to rest. Now, there's some amount of that that can
• 7:37
  It can be healthier. It depends on what the activity might be. Obviously, there's some things, if you're getting together with other people, where things have to be scheduled. But I'm not going to intentionally schedule things on my Shabbat. But I do think that patterns are really healthy. You know, saying, okay, generally speaking, I like to go to these kind of places or do these kinds of activities or be in this kind of mode
• 7:56
  during my mornings, my afternoons, my evenings. So you want to notice patterns. But sometimes the most restful Shabbats that I've ever experienced is just I know what those patterns are, and I just sort of move between the patterns without thinking about time. Because timelessness...
• 8:11
  on the Sabbath, I think is really a beautiful thing to experience. Sometimes that's asking too much of certain Sabbath experiences. Again, there are dynamics where that can be really difficult to pull off. But if you can pull time away from being the driver, the actual your watch or the hour on the clock, being what drives you from one thing to the next, I think that's really good to try to avoid that. But oftentimes if you just make the day just a giant 8 to 10-hour block of time,
• 8:41
  That can also be overwhelming, and you can find yourself after a couple hours just wondering what you want to do next, not having any patterns at all, and you'll find that also not very restful. So this is about patterns over schedules. That's a basic principle that I found to be really helpful. Number six, work with your temperament. And I would say that Sabbath is probably the most—
• 9:05
  where people's sort of extrovert versus introversion come into play pretty dramatically, maybe more than other times during the week, because of the fact that extroverts and introverts do basically recuperate in different ways. They get energy from almost opposite experiences. Extroverts tend to gain energy when they're around people. Introverts tend to gain energy when they're alone.
• 9:30
  Because of that, those temperaments, you really, really want to be very clear about that with each other, about how deeply that temperament goes. And you want to definitely have the Sabbath work more with your temperament. And so if both of you are introverts, both you and your spouse, then you're going to have probably a different looking Sabbath than if both of you are extroverts. Now, if one of you is an introvert and one of you is an extrovert, especially if you're both extreme,
• 9:55
  introvert or extrovert, then that has to be something going all the way back to the top. The first principle, stay one team. You're going to have to work out and think through how do you do that? And I oftentimes have seen that having sort of three different sort of movements to the Sabbath is oftentimes the best in a situation like that. One that is more on the introverted side, one that is more on the extroverted side, and one that might be somewhat in between.
• 10:21
  But you want to really, again, experiment and figure out how that works. But in general, if you can work with your temperament, try to figure out ways that how do you recover, how do you gain energy. That's going to be really, really valuable. Okay, guys, the last one is don't give up. Please understand that it takes work to rest. In other words, it's going to take iterations. It's going to take experiments.
• 10:38
  You're going to get good at this. This is a skill. You want to be an absolute expert at this by the time you're older. This is one of the things I loved about reading that book, The Sabbath, by Abraham Joshua Heschel in the introduction. His daughter really lays out how incredibly skilled her father was at keeping a Sabbath.
• 10:59
  And this really helped me understand how much of a skill this was. He was a man who just said, look, every single week I got to practice this. And I love that idea of practicing the Sabbath. It's going to be practiced for a long time. And this guy practiced it over and over again. He practiced it, I think, in his childhood and then certainly in his adulthood. And over time, he just became really, really, really good at it.
• 11:19
  and he was connecting with the divine basically every single Shabbat. He was experiencing total recharge every Shabbat. He was experiencing deep connection with others because he had really thought through how all these things work, and he gave himself permission and time to figure that out. And so we want you guys to understand that if you try this once or twice and you think it's going to be really easy, and then you experience some tension or difficulty, you find it was even a less restful day,
• 11:45
  than a normal day, you can easily just throw in the towel very quickly and give up and not understand that, yeah, this is going to take work. And this is why we've laid out for you guys in this whole season of episodes, all of these different tools, because we don't know what's going to really work for you. We just want to serve you guys in a way that will help you not give up, but figure out what are the tools, tactics, ideas, mindsets, principles that are going to really unlock your life.
• 12:09
  the Sabbath for you, help you find your off button and move towards a really effective, beautiful, relaxing, peaceful day of rest.
• 12:18
  So keep searching for that. Make sure that you're understanding what's working for you. But those are the seven principles. Stay one team. Make it physical. Experiment and repeat. Shake up dynamics. Patterns over schedules. Work with your temperament. And don't give up. Those are the things that really have helped us the most over time. Now, I want you guys to remember also the ripple effect that the Sabbath has on the rest of the week. This is one of the things that really surprised me about developing the skill of the Sabbath.
• 12:48
  After a number of months when I started to feel restful on a Sabbath and start to feel fully recharged, and then I started experiencing that full recharge week after week, and I actually started to rely on it, and it became predictable. Something totally changed about the rest of my week. Knowing that I could totally recharge on my Sabbath, I started to really work with a much higher level of efficiency during the week, but that only came after
• 13:15
  I built the skill and then experienced predictable total recharge and rest over a number of months. And then the ripple effect got more and more strong across the rest of my week. And the last thing I want you guys to remember, you guys, is the gospel. You know, this whole area, Paul says in Colossians 2, that the Sabbath is a shadow, but Christ is the Son. He's the reality. And so...
• 13:42
  Part of what we want you guys to experience is a full experience of the gospel during the Sabbath. And to never make this a sort of a religious obligation, a heavy burden that we place on each other or our children. We want them to experience the gospel in this, that your identity is not formed by what you do. Your identity is formed by who you are and who Christ has made you to be. But we don't want to just say that to each other or preach that at each other. We want to rest in it. We want to experience it.
• 14:11
  And so to give that gift to yourself, to your spouse, to your children, is really worth it. And so the more your Sabbaths get saturated in a gospel experience, the deeper your soul will really be healed through practicing the Sabbath. And that's more than anything what we want for you guys.
• 14:29
  Thank you guys for listening to all these episodes and for investing in trying to figure this out. We are so excited to continue to interact with you all about how to keep a Sabbath and give you guys more resources as we think of them and also to just hear and learn from you as well. So keep in touch with us about how it's going. And we want to say to you and your family that we wish you all a very peaceful season of Sabbath keeping.
• 14:57
  Thank you for listening to the family teams podcast. If you're enjoying this content or have learned something new, please make sure to leave a rating and review and share with a friend to stay up to date with our events, new content and products. You can follow us on Facebook and Instagram at family teams.