The following is adapted from The Sabbath Way by Travis West.

By the fifth day of our honeymoon, my wife Mariah and I knew something wasn’t right. We were sleeping more than two healthy twentysomethings should, even in the aftermath of planning a wedding. We decided to cut our honeymoon short and return home to find answers. It turned out we both had mononucleosis. Not surprising, given the monthslong sprint leading up to the wedding. But the timing was terrible.

We had to quit our summer landscaping jobs since all we could do was sleep. Being recent college grads who’d paid for much of our own wedding, we had no savings, and our student loans were coming due. It was a wake-up call from the world of adulting, and we still felt like toddlers. But we weren’t alone. Our church paid for a month’s rent. My parents covered another. We signed up for government assistance to help cover groceries. It was a humbling and vulnerable season.

I recovered after a few months, but Mariah was not so lucky. By our one-year anniversary she still had active mono. They called it “chronic mono.” Eventually they just called it chronic fatigue.

In the years that followed, our lives were consumed by appointments, tests, diagnoses, and medical bills—to say nothing of me starting seminary, then a doctorate; taking exams; writing papers, sermons, and lesson plans; and memorizing Greek and Hebrew flash cards. Beyond Mariah’s baseline of systemic exhaustion, doctors discovered multiple digestive conditions, an autoimmune condition, a genetic toxin-processing disorder, multiple chemical sensitivities, severe anemia, and more. To date, her complex and mysterious condition has persisted for over twenty years.

During the early years, we lived in a dual state of denial and hope. We were just holding our breath until she would recover and we could leave all this behind. But as the years wore on and nothing changed, reality sank in—and it nearly crushed us.

In the mysterious providence of God’s timing, when we felt lost and the path seemed dark and foreboding, a light broke through the clouds to shine the way. During the summers after my second and third years of seminary, Mariah and I received two once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to travel together to Jerusalem. At the time, I thought I was there to take classes and explore a future vocation as a professor of Hebrew and Old Testament. In the end, our most formative experience happened outside of class and on the weekends, when we found ourselves so caught up in the present moment, we forgot to be anxious about the future.

Within our first week on the campus of a small community near Jerusalem where my class was held, we encountered the sacred and ancient rhythm of Sabbath. It was unlike anything we’d experienced before. From sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, the whole community shut down. The city of Jerusalem shut down. The whole country seemed to shut down. Buses didn’t run. Jewish shops weren’t open. People spent time with their families and friends. The very air felt different because the atmosphere itself changed. We felt it. And it was amazing.

We fell into that weekly rhythm of rest with ease while we were there, but it didn’t survive the trip home; we hadn’t yet made it ours. We were like hungry people who’d been served fish for dinner. We were grateful, but we had no idea how to fish for ourselves. No one did Sabbath where we came from, and we didn’t know how to live it when the world no longer stopped around us. As soon as we returned to Michigan, we lost the rhythm of rest. Within the first two weeks back, I reverted to my well-honed habits of busyness and overscheduling. The blissful summer of rhythmic rest evaporated like steam from the mugs of Earl Grey tea I started drinking to stay awake on less and less sleep.

It wasn’t until we returned to Jerusalem the following summer that the rhythm of Sabbath rest clicked. We felt ourselves being re-membered. We committed then and there to reorient our lives around this practice. That’s not to say that our Sabbath practice is perfect. In fact, we’ve failed at Sabbath more than we’ve succeeded. At the same time, we’ve also learned that the Sabbath does not even compute the categories of “failure” and “success”! Instead, the Sabbath invites us to approach life playfully and not take ourselves so seriously. It invites us to come, eager and grateful, week after week, to receive its gifts of abundance, joy, presence, and delight. It invites us to embrace a more radical form of rest.

Sabbath rest is radical because it means much more than sleeping in, taking naps, or chilling poolside for an afternoon. Sabbath rest is radical because it means putting rest—and delight, and flourishing—first rather than last. Sabbath rest is radical because it will not settle for being an occasional add-on to an otherwise busy and distracted life. It wants to be the metronome that establishes and maintains our life’s rhythm. It wants to apprentice us to abundance our whole life long.

Sabbath rest is also radical because it’s countercultural. To remember the Sabbath is to resist some of the dehumanizing cultural currents flowing in our world today. For example, the Sabbath elevates:

being over doing,

people over profit,

presence over productivity,

attention over distraction,

abundance over scarcity,

gratitude over greed,

contentment over consumption,

delight over division,

connection over competition, and

both/and over either/or.

Sabbath is about learning to trust that God is God, and the world will not fall to pieces if we stop for a day to breathe and play. It’s about believing that we are worthy of experiencing delight and that such a pursuit is worth our time and intention. It’s about reconnecting with what brings us delight and draws out the child trapped inside the adult stressing over this and that. It’s about recovering a sense of wonder and awe at the sheer miracle of life. It’s about finding ways to feel God’s abiding presence in the world and in our lives. It’s about falling more deeply in love with God and with the world that mediates God’s presence and love.

I believe in the power of the Sabbath to transform lives. I don’t really understand it, but I trust it, and I’ve seen it happen over and over—to my students, to my friends, and to myself. It won’t happen overnight, and it won’t be accompanied by fireworks or a laser light show. But it will happen—slowly, often imperceptibly, over the course of time. As you lean into trust, into gratitude, into delight, and into presence, your heart will expand, your delight muscles will get strong and toned, you will grow in self-compassion, your commitment to justice will deepen, and your increased capacity to love your neighbor as yourself may surprise you.