For nearly four decades, I kept the Sabbath as sacred—a literal, unwavering observance of the seventh day rest, measured from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday. Not “the weekend.” Not just a pause. A consecration. To many, that practice sits on the shelf of my old life, a leftover from the strange world of The People of the Sign. But like the stones of ancient altars, it still anchors my memory—and it still speaks, if we have ears to hear, to the hunger for meaning that will not die in us.
It is almost fashionable now to talk about “rest” or “self-care.” But the Sabbath is not self-care. It is not a productivity hack. It is, first and last, an invitation—ancient, cosmic, and personal—to enter into communion with God, to become, even for a moment, who we were meant to be.
The Seventh Day—Not Saturn’s Day
Go back to Genesis:
“And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it” (Genesis 2:2–3, KJV).
Moses, we are told, wrote those words literally millennia before the invention of what we call “religion.”The inspired author simply refers to it as “the seventh day.” Not Saturn’s day—not Shabbat - which would have evoked the planetary idol so easily worshiped by the empires around Israel. In Genesis, God’s act of resting, hallowing, and blessing this simple interval of time is a kind of cosmic protest. The ancients mapped their weeks by the cycles of the visible heavens, but the creation story insists: before there were gods of sun or moon or Saturn, there was a day set apart by the One who is beyond all idols. The God of Time itself.
The refusal to use the name of the day of a competing god is no accident. It is a clearing of the table—a refusal to let the Sabbath become one more slot on a calendar crammed with foreign shrines.
Sabbath as Sign: Communion Not Compliance
As I documented in The People of the Sign, Sabbath-keeping wasn’t intended as a badge of spiritual elitism—a resume item for the righteous. It was the “sign between God and His people.” It was, in essence, the bridge by which God and the faithful agreed to meet, week after week. The very first Sabbath-keepers were not just seeking an escape from labor—they sought to commune. In a world teeming with carved gods and household idols, Israel sanctified a day.
I once wrote about this through the unlikely lens of a pop song, Crash Test Dummies’ “God Shuffled His Feet.” The scene:
God gathers up the people he made, and lays back in the shade. They want “the real thing,” something more than their local priest or the trappings of ritual. So they start firing questions at him. God clears his throat… and tells them a story that, frustratingly, seems just like something they'd heard before, but the meaning escapes. And they stare at him, as God shuffled His feet.
That gently ironic tune underscores the timeless, human heartbreak: We ache for visitation, for genuine encounter. But what will we do when it comes—not only as miracle, but as quiet commandment? Sabbath was always less about compliance—more, always, about creating space for divine communion, about setting the table.
From Gaze to Glare—Losing the Sky
How did lose this? For much of history, the ancients looked upward in awe. They watched the dance of “lights in the firmament,” tracked the moon’s roundness and decline, and hallowed their days according to a cosmic rhythm. Psalm 19 catches the mood:
“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge” (Psalm 19:1–2).
We moved from the city, and out in the country, on our little hill, I can still look up from my backyard, and see this majesty spread out. But just a few miles away the dull orange haze of streetlamps and suburbia washes this away. Edison’s favorite invention was the phonograph, not the lightbulb. Perhaps he anticipated how manmade light would one day silence the stars, drown out its speech. By imposing our own glare we’ve lost even the capacity to be humbled by the vastness of the night sky.
And within our own walls, another shift: Archaeologists unearth the ruins of Israel and its neighbors and find little stone houses, each with an alcove facing the room’s center. There the ancients placed their household idols, their “gods,” not to be worshiped out of sight, but to anchor the rhythm of daily life.
Fast-forward: What now occupies pride of place in our living rooms? The glowing rectangle, the digital altar—beaming the faces of our modern “stars,” our culture’s true celebrities, into our most sacred spaces. “Let us make man in our image,” God says in Genesis. But we, it seems, are satisfied to make everything in our own, endlessly reflected, endlessly distracted, in our self-referential echo chambers.
A Sea of Distraction—Calling Us Back
Forty years of Sabbaths: the rituals, the meals, the crackle of cassette tapes with sermons from men who barely knew me, the sense of anticipatory hush on sunset Friday. It was not always easy. Sometimes it felt hollow, even punitive. But beneath all of it ran a living vein: the hope, raw and wild, that once a week we might, by intention, meet with the God who made us.
“The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath,” Jesus said (Mark 2:27). But He continued: “Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath.” The gift is not law-bound. It is not checked off, nor is it bargained for. It is, always, an invitation to return to what we have lost—and to the One we have lost it for.
Bahá’u’lláh writes:
“O Son of Spirit! My first counsel is this: Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart, that thine may be a sovereignty ancient, imperishable and everlasting.”
The rhythm of Sabbath is not about winning points or building fortresses against culture. It is about clearing the static, lowering the self-made lights, and together, or alone, becoming again those ancient stargazers, knees in the grass—waiting not for distraction, but for communion. We cannot conjure God with our effort, or program sacredness into the algorithm. But we can, on any day, or every seventh day, shuffle our own feet, look up, and wait expectantly.
Bringing Home the Sabbath
It is possible, even in this sea of entertainment and anxiety, to sanctify a moment—an hour, a day, a Saturday sunset—to remember what we have forgotten. No, you do not need to recreate the legalistic anxieties of my former church, or discard the gifts of technology and wonder. What is asked is even harder: to dare to make space for awe, for awkwardness, for a silent room with neither television nor idol.
Maybe this week, close the laptop one hour earlier. Maybe, turn off the living room’s flickering altars. Sit in silence. Gaze at whatever stars you can see—or close your eyes and remember the ones someone, somewhere, once saw for you.
God is not waiting to entertain us. He waits, as He always has, to commune.
Let us return, before the memory of Sabbath is lost—as so much else has been—to that “sign between God and His people.” Let us shuffle our own feet, and smile, not because the story is familiar, but because, after all these years, we still ache to hear it told—anew.
If this journey stirs something in you, share it. Start a Sabbath practice, however humble. Invite yourself, and one other, into the slow, sacred rhythm the world forgot. You are created in the image of God. And God loves His creation.
With gratitude and hope,
Wade
Scripture Referenced
Genesis 2:2–3
Psalm 19:1–2
Mark 2:27–28
Bahá’í Reference
Bahá’u’lláh, Hidden Words, Arabic #1
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