In our family, I am the vacation planner. We decide as a family where we want to go and what we want to do, but I am the one who goes to work making travel arrangements, figuring out accommodations, and determining the daily itinerary of activities and attractions.

My itineraries are masterful — designed to maximize our experiences and ensure we take in all the sights at our various travel destinations. The problem: I often fail to build in enough time to eat. Instead, we are often scrambling to grab food when we can, supplemented by the stash of granola bars I keep in my bag. No time to sit down for a meal . . . We’ve got a world to explore! 

Now that my kids are older, this has become a running joke in our family.  “Are we going to eat this time mom or shall we prepare to starve?” To be fair, it can be challenging to find places to eat when you are in remote regions of a national park or when you are trying to catch buses, trains, ferries, or planes.

Still, I’ve begun to question my approach to vacations, wondering why I feel the need to jam our time together chock full of activities, why I inadvertently measure the success of our vacations by the quantity and quality of our experiences, and why our vacations leave us feeling not only spent but, in the end, more disconnected from the world around us and from others.   

About ten years ago, I happened upon Walter Brueggemann’s Sabbath as Resistance, a short book that provides a piercing analysis of our current socioeconomic culture through the lens of the Exodus story in Scripture. In it, Brueggemann describes how an economy like ours of endless production and insatiable consumption shapes and conditions how we think about ourselves as human beings, reducing us and our sense of worth to what we do, what we accomplish, and how much we have.

Reading this book was like looking in a mirror . . . I recognized so much of my own anxieties, fears, and distorted perceptions of myself in his description. What became so painfully obvious was that I had so thoroughly absorbed the fallacy that we are what we do, that I had turned our vacation time, our opportunities for sabbath rest, into a list of experiences to consume. Instead of concerning myself with how to create an environment that encouraged deeper connection with each other and with the created world, I was focused on how to fit in one more hike or one more attraction.

Brueggemann’s analysis of the biblical exodus as a rejection of Pharaoh’s rat-race economy of production and consumption was my “aha” moment. In calling his people out of Egypt, God was inviting them into a whole new way of thinking about their relationships with each other and the world, into what Brueggemann refers to as an economy of neighborliness.

In an economy of neighborliness, we are not reduced to what we do, acquire, desire, or build. Instead, we can be who we were created to be, who we truly are, that is, lovers of God and lovers of others. An economy of neighborliness is based not on the endless accumulation of personal wealth but on communal sharing and mutual responsibility. In such an economy, resources are not commodities to be exploited for personal gain but gifts to be received with gratitude and shared.

At the center of an economy of neighborliness is not frenzy, fatigue, and fear, but gratitude, rest, and trust, attitudes and postures that are cultivated through the practice of sabbath. Sabbath provides the necessary framework, or as Travis West argues in his new book, The Sabbath Way, an organizing principle for a life devoted to love of God and love of neighbor.

Sabbath rest reminds us that God is in control, not us, allowing us to let go of our to-do list and teaching us to trust God. Sabbath rest gives us time to spend with our neighbors in ways that foster deep connection and disrupt attitudes of covetousness and competition. Sabbath is the alternative to a soul-crushing culture of insatiable accumulation that has left us tired, empty, and alone.

We live in a nation that has lost a sense of neighborliness, of communal sharing and mutual responsibility. Neighbors near and far are perceived as a threat to our own well-being rather than friends and companions in mutual flourishing. Human beings are treated as collateral damage in the quest for power and wealth. Neighborliness seems like a quaint practice of years gone by. None of this feels good. So how do we resist being conditioned and shaped by such a system? How do we say no to reducing our lives to what we accomplish or what we acquire? What does it look like to be liberated from Egypt?

For Israel, the sabbath became a sign of the covenant that God established with his people (Exodus 31:13). The practice of sabbath marked Israel as God’s people and signaled that Yahweh was Israel’s God. Observing the sabbath became the alternative to insatiable productivity and consumption and ushered Israel into a different way of doing life together. 

That invitation to sabbath rest is one that God freely extends to us as well. Together, as communities of God’s people, we are invited to embrace sabbath rest as an act of resistance to a life that leaves us tired, empty, and alone. To cultivate communities of goodness that serve as an alternative to an economy of insatiable production and consumption. And to welcome the gift of connection, community, and rest.

Soon I will start planning our next vacation. It’s slow-going, but I’m learning to let go of the to-do list, to build in more opportunities for simply being together, and to trust that God will bless our time together in ways that I can’t begin to ask for or imagine. So who knows? Maybe on this next vacation, we will have opportunities to linger over good food. Maybe we will even take a few naps. And in our sabbath rest, I pray we will rediscover in our life with God and with each other, God’s gifts of goodness, gratitude, and grace.

Header photo by Frankie Cordoba on Unsplash
Arc de Triomphe photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
To-do list photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash