The Sabbath Way: Finding the Rest Your Soul Craves by Travis Westනියැදිය

How Stopping to Smell the Flowers Can Literally Change Your Life

The climax of the Bible’s first creation account is not the creation of humankind, despite what you may have heard. We are not creation’s crown—the Sabbath is! The Scripture tells us that “on the seventh day God finished the work that God had done” (Genesis 2:2). As an old Jewish Sabbath tune puts it, the Sabbath is “last in creation, first in intention.” Paradoxically, God completed God’s work by ceasing from it! By doing so, God created rest. We call that rest Sabbath.

What did God do on that first Sabbath? God celebrated and enjoyed all that God had made! Being in the midst of creation gives God joy. We get a glimpse of this joy through the eyes of the poet of Psalm 104. After reviewing an extensive list of God’s creative accomplishments displayed on a cosmic scale, the poet shifts to celebrate the seemingly insignificant ways that God glories in creation, from providing water for the wild donkeys to drink, to growing great cedars that provide shelter for singing birds, to sprouting grass for cattle to eat, and even to playing fetch with Leviathan in the ocean! (See verses 11-17, 26).

Connecting with creation gives us joy as well. Researchers, including emotion scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists, even philosophers and theologians, all impress upon us the transformative impact of regular contact with the created world. Something necessary happens to us when we venture beyond the concrete jungles of our lives, dig our hands into the soil, and touch our feet to the earth. When the traffic, the noise, and the neon lights are replaced by birdsong coming from real birds (not an app!), leaves clapping with the wind, and light dancing on the surface of a stream, our hearts shift into a lower gear and our nervous systems move from dysregulation toward peace. Stopping to smell the flowers can literally bring us home to ourselves.

The Sabbath celebrates the created world and urges us to get outside. It helps us make room in our lives to do so. But the Sabbath invitation is not just to get your physical body outside while your mind races through next week’s to-do list. The invitation is to be really present to what you see and to use what you see to prompt yourself to praise, just like the psalmist in Psalm 104.

Don’t just look at the Milky Way or a butterfly or a beaver dam and marvel at its beauty, immensity, or complexity. Do that. But also bear witness to how each of those things brings praise and glory to God simply by being itself. The tree praises God by “treeing.” The caterpillar praises God by trusting its instincts and disintegrating in its chrysalis. The stars praise God by consistently sending their light across the cosmos. And we, too, praise and glorify God best when we are our full selves, when we don’t try to be somebody or something other than who we are. The Sabbath gives us time to remember who we are, and creation plays a critical role in bringing us back home to ourselves.