Abba, We Heard You The First Time About Resting

We say we trust Abba with everything — our finances, our health, our kids’ futures, the outcome of an email we sent forty minutes ago and have already refreshed six times. But hand us a commandment as simple as “rest,” and suddenly we’ve got questions, loopholes, and a six-point rebuttal.

Here is our official response to Genesis 2:2–3, submitted with love and a slightly guilty conscience.

“We’ll rest right after this.”

This is not a season. This is a permanent condition. There has always been a “this,” and there will always be a “this,” and somewhere between the last one and the next one, we were supposed to stop and notice the earth kept on turning without our help.

We will let wine sit untouched in a dark cupboard for three weeks and call it patience.

Ask us to leave a batch of homemade ginger wine alone to ferment, and we won’t touch it. We’ll set a reminder, walk away, and trust the process completely, because we’re good at making wine. But ask us to leave ourselves alone for five minutes, and we panic like we’ve forgotten to check on a baby.

We will schedule “Rest” like it’s a work meeting.

Thirty minutes in the morning with a cup of coffee, calendar event, agenda: Rest. Pray. Journal. And then again mid-day. Breathe. Rest. Stretch (optional). Then straight into the next call, having technically rested, on the record, with a paper trail to prove it.

exhaustion has Become a personality trait.

“I just can’t sit still” isn’t the compliment we’re really fishing for. It’s usually the first symptom, not the whole personality. The number of times I’ve heard “Abby, we can do that tomorrow”, or “Abby, take a break!” or a number of other things…

We will read the fourth commandment and skip straight to application.

“Remember the Sabbath” is not actually a suggestion with an asterisk that says unless you’re really, genuinely, this-time-it’s-different busy. We know this. We’ve read it in three translations, or maybe more. We still schedule “rest” for 11:47pm, right before we fall asleep mid-scroll.

And yet, Abba has never once asked us for a productivity report.

Nowhere in Scripture does God grade our week by the to-do list we cleared. He rested first, before there was a single thing to be tired from, and then told the people He’d just rescued out of slavery — Israelites with every reason to keep proving they were free by working themselves into the ground — to stop (Exodus 20:8-11, Exodus 31:12-17). Not because the work was done. Rest was never meant to be a reward you earn after the work is finished. Real rest is built into the rhythm of the week before anyone had done anything to deserve it, like little mercies from heaven.

Some believers keep that rhythm on Saturdays, honouring the pattern of the original Jewish Shabbat, sundown to sundown. Others rest on Sundays, in remembrance of the resurrection. Which day it lands on has been argued over for a very long time. But the day matters less than the fenced-off stopping — one day a week when we’re not allowed to earn anything, prove anything, or optimise anything. Just Abba, and whoever’s at the table breaking bread with us taking in His goodness and grace.

So maybe the caution sign in our kitchen this week shouldn’t say “Wet Floor.” It should say:

CAUTION: We Said We’d Rest. We Lied.

And maybe, just maybe, the wine isn’t the only thing around here that needs three weeks of pure rest. Ask me. I know.

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