The Gift of Sabbath

Early on in the pandemic, I got sick with what was likely a case of Covid. My symptoms were mild yet distinct from anything I’d ever been ill with before. Aside from just a day or two of shortness of breath and what seemed like never ending thirst, I thought I had recovered. 

But strange things kept happening: My heart rate and blood pressure seemed wonky. There was a pain in my chest I’d never felt before when I breathed, like shards of glass scraping the inside of my lungs, which made it hard to catch my breath. After a while, my legs began to tingle. My fingers and feet changed colors—sometimes purple, sometimes white, sometimes red. Once, it felt like water was trickling down my face. I started to confuse words and mistype simple phrases, reversing letters or using the wrong version of words, “there” instead of “their.” 

This, not those other things, was the most humiliating and alarming symptom. I am a writer! A copy editor! I dress up as the Grammar Police every Halloween! How could I use the wrong “there”?!

I went to the ER (for chest pains, not for the wrong “there”). I visited a pulmonologist. My primary care provider listened to my bizarre list of symptoms and ordered test after test, all coming back negative. When the nerve complaints started, she referred me to a neurologist, who ordered more blood tests and referred me to a cardiologist. Finally, something came back abnormal, and I was diagnosed with POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome), which answered all of my heart/lung/headache/fatigue/brain fog/temp intolerance issues, and a very serious B12 deficiency, which explained the tingling and dripping sensations.

I tried to keep working from March, when my illness began, until October, slogging through each day in a fog of symptoms and exhaustion while training colleagues via Zoom and suffering through marketing strategy sessions that triggered migraines. There had been occasions where a client had given me headaches in the past. . .but even pleasant meetings were provoking headaches now. When I finished work for the day, I was finished for everyone/thing else, as well, and spent the remainder of each afternoon and evening shuffling zombie-like through the house until I crashed and fell asleep on the couch. 

After something like 45 days with headaches, I decided to resign from my job. 

Maybe I could have taken a leave of absence to recover, but I didn’t know, after the POTS diagnosis, if I would ever recover. Before I was sick, I had boundless vats of energy to dip into. I worked with joyful abandon. I loved my job and my colleagues. I’d stay up late after the kids went to bed working on something for the fun of it. I know, a different kind of sick, right?

Before I was sick, when I wasn’t working my paid job, I was working on other projects around the house, or working on my latest book project. I viewed rest as laziness—why relax when you could collect firewood, plant a garden, go for a hike, plan a party, go out to eat, lead a Bible study, and so on. And trust me, there was always an “and so on” to tack onto that list. 

Rest never came easy to me, because rest was not a virtue I was taught. I was taught to work hard. I counted my life as valuable by what I was contributing, by what I had worked for and earned. 

I was a human doing, not a human being.

My last day with my company was in early January 2021. I bawled my eyes out through the beautiful going-away party my colleagues threw me via Zoom. I keep the red Swingline stapler and the framed art they gave me on my desk. Quitting my job was one of the hardest things I had ever done. I wasn’t leaving for something else or leaving a place I couldn’t tolerate; I left because I couldn’t do the work anymore. I left because I needed rest.

In the many months since I resigned, God has taught me that I am loved and valued just because I am. Because I was created by God, in the image of God, called one of God’s children, one of God’s own, because I exist. 

I am not a human doing; I am a human being. 

God completely reframed my existence. I used to think I had to earn my place. Now, I hear the call to rest in God’s presence.

Covid forced me to rest. I needed to be able to sleep whenever I felt fatigued, or else the fatigue would spiral into a headache and brain fog and exhaustion, triggering all of the symptoms I was trying so hard to alleviate. The only way I could learn about rest and begin to understand the value of Sabbath was through my chronic illness.

Rest is a gift. It is what God did on day seven of the creation story, and it’s one of the ten commandments: keep the Sabbath holy. The Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “The Sabbath is the presence of God in the world, open to the soul of man.” He also said that “God is not in things of space, but in moments of time.” 

When we push against demands to produce, produce, produce, we open up space for more moments in time to experience God. The rest we gain through one day of Sabbath permeates the rest of our time, throughout the week, “like a palace of time with a kingdom for all,” Heschel wrote. “It is not a date but an atmosphere.”

Covid did more to me than give me a chronic illness that I am mostly recovered from, now, three years later. It was the ruthless key that opened the door to a palace of time in God’s kingdom. I wish that it hadn’t taken a life-altering disease for me to understand and accept the gift of Sabbath, but sometimes the only way to arrive at hope is through suffering. 

On this side of suffering, it is far easier for me to say “no” to the demands that insist I need to produce more instead of just producing enough. It is far easier for me to say “yes” to rest, to time richly spent in relationship, in the outdoors, in communion, in prayer. Whereas before, I had no choice except to rest or risk being depleted down to nothing, now, I have to choose.

Rest is not just for the purpose of recharging so I can get back in the hamster wheel. Walter Brueggeman, another great theologian, wrote, “Sabbath is the celebration of life beyond and outside productivity.” 

Sabbath is a gift in and of itself, a bundle of peace, presence, purpose, worth, serenity, and love. Sometimes the gift is forced upon us, for recovery, and other times it is one we have to intentionally choose, the pearl of great price we’d be willing to sell everything to obtain. Wherever you stand today, in exhaustion or with vast stores of energy, choose the gift that God freely gives you, and rest.

–Written by Sarah Wells. Used by permission from the author.