The sleepless nights stack up as the workload continues to grow. The stress builds like a remarkable crescendo until the climax, mere minutes before the deadline. But this is college. This is what life is supposed to be like. So I embrace it. I share stories with peers at the lunch table about late nights and cups of coffee at absurd hours of the night. I bid goodbye to thoughts of a good night's sleep and settle into the pervasive fog of sleep deprivation.
During my first semester of college, I was fully submerged in this collegiate micro-culture. I have since looked back and been puzzled by this behavior. I reveled in the glory of a sleep-deprived life. Is this not bizarre?
In my second semester, I began to implement a Sabbath. Nothing dogmatic; rather, I endeavored to create a day that met my needs for relaxing and unwinding (Mark 2:27). For me, this simply meant that one day a week I would do no schoolwork. The Sabbaths came at first with much trepidation. I felt as though I was breaking the rules. Did I really have the audacity to think that I could be relaxed while the tempest of midterms neared? Wouldn't I fall behind? Apparently not.
The very first thing I noticed was that I was much more productive during the weeks preceded by a Sabbath than the weeks that were not. I was at first surprised that the less time I spent working led to more overall productivity. Naturally, I was drawn to this increase in productivity, and it became my chief motivation for continuing to take a Sabbath. While not necessarily wrong, it was akin to appreciating a car for the seat warmers only, not the actual ability of the car to function as a means of transportation. I came to realize that this draw towards being productive was itself contrary to what it means to take a Sabbath.
When given a reprieve from thoughts of tests and studying, I was able to ask: what is the purpose of everything that I am studying? Perhaps it is to learn, but if to learn, then what do I gain from that knowledge? Or perhaps studies lead to a degree, but what's the purpose of that degree? I found that the room, which was a stressed college education, led only to more stressful hallways that ended in stressful doors; stressful graduate school, stressful occupation and stressful home-life.
The only place I could envision rest was retirement, yet I could hardly fool myself into thinking that a lifetime of stressful habits would suddenly slough off my shoulders once I reached the land of leisure. I learned forthwith that taking a Sabbath allowed me to shake loose of the shackles of the weekly to-do lists and tasks. Leaning into the Sabbath allows me to relinquish the perceived importance of my daily activities and forces me to admit that the world will continue to exist even if I don't meet every deadline or know the answer to every test question.
These weekly times of quiet allow me to be connected to something that extends much farther than the feeble reach of my own pursuits. It is a time to stop, listen, and be restored by still waters (Psalm 23:2). Now I consistently sleep eight hours. I worry less, and I have a firmer grasp of my own blip-ness on the timeline of eternity. Through implementation of the Sabbath, I have learned why it is good that everything is meaningless.
