The Field He Left Alone

There is a field on that farm that his grandfather used to leave alone every seventh year, and nobody has done it since he died.

Not for any reason anybody could defend. It simply stopped, the way things do, and now that field works every year like all the others and the yields are fine and no one has ever raised it.

He thinks about it more than he lets on.

Because here is the other thing, and the field is only the picture.

He has not taken a whole day off in about four years.

Not a day where nothing is expected. He has had days where he did less, and one week at his sister's where he was on the phone the entire time, and a Sunday afternoon last autumn that he still talks about.

But a whole day, from waking to sleeping, with nothing in it that had to be done? Four years, give or take.

And if you asked him why, he would give you a list, and every item on it would be true. There is a great deal on him. People are depending on him. It is not a season for that sort of thing and it has not been a season for that sort of thing since about the spring of the year his father was ill.

Underneath the list, though, there is a sentence he has never said out loud, and it is not on the list because he would be embarrassed by it.

If I stop, it comes apart.

If you have a sentence like that under your list, come and lean on this gate a minute. Nobody is going to add anything to your week.

God rested, and He did not need to

There is a reason given for the fourth commandment, and it is not the reason most people carry.

For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day.Exodus 20:11

Stop on the word rested and think about who is doing it.

God was not tired. There is no version of this in which the Almighty needed to sit down. The rest in that verse is not recovery and it is not maintenance. It is something God did on purpose, in front of everybody, as part of how the thing was made, and then He wrote it into the law as a pattern for people who would never once believe they could afford it.

Which means rest is not what you do when the work runs out. It is a thing built into the design by somebody who did not need it and did it anyway.

You are not being asked to earn a day, and there was never a bar to clear first. Exodus 20:11 grounds the command in what God Himself did rather than in what anybody deserves, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a command land as a gift rather than a demand, which means the day is not waiting behind your list.

The world holds together without you for a day

Now let me go at the sentence under your list, because it is the actual obstacle and no amount of encouragement gets past it.

If I stop, it comes apart.

I am not going to tell you that nothing depends on you. Things do. You are not imagining the weight and I am not going to flatter you by pretending you could vanish for a week without consequence. Psalm 121:4 says he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep, and it is written about God and about nobody else in the whole book, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a place through the hours a man is not in it.

But look at what the claim actually requires. It requires that the holding together of your farm, your family, your work and the people who lean on you is finally resting on your continuous attention, and that there is no other hand under any of it.

You are not the one holding this together, and you never were the last thing underneath it. Colossians 1:17 says that in Him all things consist and hold together, and it is His Spirit who is at work in the ordinary machinery of a life, which means the sentence under your list is not describing your situation, it is describing a fear about it.

And I am not handing you a plan. There is no scheme here for how to stop, nothing to keep up, nothing to fall behind on. This site does not do that.

There is one more thing worth saying, and it is the thing this whole tradition paid for. You have permission that does not depend on how the work is going, and you have it today. Mark 2:27 has Jesus saying the sabbath was made for man and not man for the sabbath, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that the right way round in a person, which means the day was made as a thing given to you rather than a thing you are measured by.

I am not going to tell you which day, and this site never will. That question has cost more than it was worth and you cannot fail this article by having the wrong answer to it. One hour, whenever, is where this starts.