Abba, Please Don't Tell Us About Day Six

Abba, we need to talk about a Friday afternoon feeling.

It’s the one where we all quietly agree that the working week is over by about 3 p.m., that “TGIF” is practically a doctrine, and that anyone who answers an email on Saturday is either a workaholic or a missionary.

Then we open Your Word and find this:

“Six days you shall labor and do all your work.” (Exodus 20:9)

Six. Not five. Six.

We checked other translations. We checked the Hebrew. We even checked whether “six” might be a metaphor for “five, plus a long weekend.” It’s not.

Attempt #1: “But Abba, that was for the Israelites.”

Fair. But then we scrolled back to Genesis and found that You Yourself worked six days. Light, sky, land, sea, sun, moon, stars, fish, birds, animals, and humans, all before the seventh day.

You made an entire universe in a six-day week, and some of us can’t finish one spreadsheet by Thursday.

Attempt #2: “Surely You took a long lunch.”

Genesis says, “And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.” Nothing about a team-building offsite, a “quick sync,” or a Friday half-day. Just work, then “it was good,” then on to the next thing.

Attempt #3: “But the weekend is a human right.”

We drafted a petition. It had 14 signatories, 3 of whom were on leave. As the Author of the week, You declined to respond.

Attempt #4: “But Abba, people keep telling me to take Saturdays off.”

They mean well. They really do. “Abby, Saturday isn’t for working,” they tell me, with the gentle concern usually reserved for someone about to eat a leftover duck moile curry that’s been in the freezer for too long.

And I reply, with great confidence, “Abba worked six days, so I can too.”

It’s a wonderful argument. It has Scripture, it has a divine precedent, and it has absolutely nothing to say about the fact that You then took a whole day off and I… did not.

Every now and then I do try to get with the rest of the world. I tell myself that Saturday is just for my glue stuff and crafts, or for the small, boring, holds-everything-together jobs. Light, sensible, almost restful.

That lasts until about 10 a.m. Then I open “just one quick thing,” and an hour later I’m back in the middle of a proper work day, wondering where the glue stuff went and how a weathered down old laptop got back into my hands.

Attempt #5: “Abba, what about burnout?”

Good point, and You already addressed it. Day seven. You rested, and You told us to rest too. The command to rest is real. The command to work is also real. We just keep quoting the half we like.

Attempt #6: “Fine. But two days off, surely?”

One. You designed one. We invented the other, and now we guard it like a family recipe.

What we’ve learned

Maybe the point was never the number. The week You built for your children has a rhythm: six days of honest, wholehearted work, then one day of real rest. Not a day of scrolling, not a day of catching up on laundry and guilt, but rest that says, “The world is still turning, and I’m not the one turning it.”

So Abba, we’ll try to work with a little more heart on the six days, and rest with a little more trust on the seventh. And we’ll stop treating Friday at 3 p.m. as a spiritual gift.

As for me, I’ll keep quoting You back to my well-meaning friends. But I’ll also try, truly, to let Saturday be glue-stuff-only, and to let the seventh day, whether it is Friday or Sunday, be like the one You actually meant.

(We make no promises about Monday mornings. You’ve seen us.)

Hineni,
Your slightly sheepish children

Abba, Please Don’t Tell Us About Day Six