“Do you, when you wake up in the night, remember what you were supposed to have done, vexed that you did not meet expectations? Do you fall asleep counting bricks? Do you dream of more bricks you have to make yet, or of bricks you have made that were flawed? We dream so because we have forgotten the exodus! …

…Those who remember and keep Sabbath find they are less driven, less coerced, less frantic to meet deadlines, free to be, rather than to do…”

‘Sabbath as Resistance’, Walter Brueggemann (2014 pp.42-43)

That first paragraph pretty much describes a lot of my waking moments. When I was younger I spent a lot of time very focused on the bricks I thought I was supposed to be making (i.e. the work I was doing). Now I am wondering whether the bricks I made were of any value or not. I take refuge in the received wisdom that “nothing is ever wasted”.

With the benefit of a bit of hindsight I do now wish I could gift that younger version of myself the knowledge that my work wasn’t really all that important. And that life itself matters more. I had moments; flashes of insight about that, but all too briefly.

I remember once when I was a trainee teacher being on a very stressful placement, where I felt my neck being breathed down constantly by my supervisor. The school holidays interrupted and I went away with a few friends to a Christian festival. During the worship there, I realised that I had allowed that work supervisor to become something like God to me; a very unkind god they were too. I rested for long enough to notice what had happened, and then decided to refuse to allow that to continue. The next term, I stopped staying up till 2am every night producing endless differentiated worksheets for every lesson, and jumping every time the bell rang. I just did my best. Weirdly, the supervisor stopped engaging with me completely. They’d either seen I could actually be trusted, or just had a break themselves and decided to finally leave me be. It was such a relief!

So my question to myself now is; “Why do I find this pattern repeating over and over again in my life?” Lack of rest certainly has a lot to do with it. And as a self employed person rest becomes in theory a lot easier to get (I am my own boss after all), but in practice sometimes much harder, because of the fear of scarcity and whether I will be able to earn enough, rather than a posture of trust that what is needful will be gifted to me. I think for me there is also a fear that I will lose respect because I am not “doing enough” or “achieving enough”. I notice within myself a constant tendency to respond with fear when someone else in my world appears to be doing or achieving so much more than me.

Brueggemann points out that all of these fears have to do with the idea of possessing; of producing and consuming, rather than of being given what is needed. But God’s way throughout the biblical narrative and the Judeo-Christian experience of God’s people is about gift and collaboration, rather than production and consumption.

There will always be inequality if you base everything on production and consumption (some people will always be able to produce more than others), but there is never inequality in a gift given equally to all.

As part of the command to observe sabbath, the day of rest, the Israelites were to remember that they were once foreign slaves in Egypt living under the hostile, oppressive regime of Pharoah, who required them to make ever more bricks without straw, with no rest at all. Given this horrendous corporate experience of coercion, having escaped Pharoah’s rule, they were required to encourage everyone among them to enjoy sabbath rest, including any foreigners living with them, children, adults, even slaves of any sort should have sabbath rest. Because there is equality in this gift. And there is no anxiety about production because the Giver is to be trusted and the gift will be enough.

A lot of things are leading me back to the word “enough” again, this lent. and to the idea of enough, which I think may be one of the most radical notions in our age of production, acquisition and consumption. Enough. What a beautiful idea and reality.