Wrapping up My Year of Shmita

I’ve been putting off writing this recap for weeks now. I think it’s because I’m not sure how to tie up my experience with a neat and tidy bow when the reality is obvious: there is no bow.

Concepts of healthy rest, rejection of misplaced guilt and self-loathing, spiritual renewal, and gratitude practices are life-long pursuits.

That said, I have lived one year out of my thirty-seven trying to do things a bit differently. I didn’t leave my family to go on a silent retreat, I didn’t pre-tear pieces of toilet paper, and I didn’t even always shut down my phone on Sunday. From the outside, I don’t think a casual observer would have guessed I was trying anything out of the ordinary. But I can feel the difference the last year has made and…wasn’t that the whole point?

If you happen to be new to my blog, how about I back up a bit.

WHY AND WHAT

At the end of 2023 I had reached what felt – to some degree – like a breaking point. For a number of reasons, life at its current pace felt untenable. I knew I needed time to recharge, lower my stress levels, and realign my priorities. I was living on high alert, perpetually on the razor’s edge of a mental or physical crash.

While reading a book about exhaustion (how fitting!), I had what Gretchen Rubin would describe as a “lightening bolt” moment. I needed to embrace a Sabbath. This wasn’t just about physical rest – by design, the state of my body is indelibly intertwined with the state of my spirit.

As a Christian, I had plenty of head knowledge about the concept of resting one day of the week. It’s a commandment! And for generations it meant you couldn’t play sports or read fiction or work in the garden. But in my world, if I’m being honest, the Sabbath felt like yet another day to prove my worth through productivity. Each Sunday morning I would sing songs about how I worship a God who asks nothing of me but genuine faith. I’d read verses about rest (though obviously neglecting to slow down and turn the words into application). I’d show up to church and small group in an attempt to become more spiritually mature. But I still lived life as though Christ offered a works-based salvation. I still lived life as if I needed to produce something for Him to accept and love me.

It was time to focus on restoration, not production…which is how I ended up taking the concept of Sabbath a step further by embracing the concept of Shmita, which first shows up in the historical record in Exodus 23:10-11 (about 1440 BCE).

Shmita (שמיטה) – often translated “release” – is an exhale for the land and for the people; a year-long halt in production with the express purpose of creating a better long-term harvest while promoting social equity and spiritual renewal. In the Biblical context, Shmita directed Israelites on how they were to tend the land in these sabbatical years – no planting, no pruning, no harvesting for profit.

I had different – albeit tangential – goals.

I wanted to:

• Cultivate my faith
• Move more slowly.
• Exercise more intuitively.
• Sleep more.
• Nap. (Yes, “nap” gets a separate bullet point!)
• Bake.
• Read books during daylight hours.
• Focus more on the present instead of worrying about the future.

RELEVANT POSTS |

Announcing My Year of Shmita [Background about what sparked this topic along with some Biblical context.]

The Best of One World? [Discussing my decision to step down from my main working role to better enable me to pursue rest.]

WHO

Me. Elisabeth. The end.

This wasn’t a family pursuit, though I believe everyone in my immediate family benefited from my Year of Shmita and perhaps indirectly adjusted some of their own behaviours. This wasn’t a blog challenge or something I did with a group from my local church.

WHEN

For the entirety of 2024. Unlike the weekly Jewish Sabbath, Shmita was observed for a calendar year and I gladly followed that pattern.

WHERE

I wanted the themes of rest to permeate everything about my life. My relationships. My habits (physical, spiritual, emotional). My decisions. My work. My leisure.

SUMMARY OF MY YEAR OF SHMITA

I’m so grateful I was able to take a year to focus on rest. Did it completely revolutionize how I live? No. Do I still frequently feel tired, snap at my family, and overfill my schedule? No comment/how about you ask my family.

I am no fool – a year of resting is no cure for being human. There will always be limitations; I will constantly butt up against the harsh reality that, despite my best efforts, I cannot control everything.

But my year of rest was restful. It resulted in some (what I believe/hope to be permanent) changes in how I look at the world, my Creator, and myself.

The following is my best attempt at a neat and tidy bow:

• Rest is hard. In general, modern society does not know how to rest well. Greed propels production and worth has become synonymous with output. Humanity has been dehumanized, stripped of the very needs that make us human and expected to act, produce, and recharge like robots.
• Rest promotes equality. One of the most revolutionary things about the Sabbath of the Bible was how it applied to all genders, races, and socioeconomic classes. Women were to have a day off. Slaves. Immigrants. Children. Animals. The land. Even more radical? The seven-year cycle of Shmita helped prevent wealth disparity as debts were forgiven (shemittat kesafim), food and other resources were made freely available to those in need (tzedakah), and slaves were released (Exodus 21:2).
• Rest encourages community. During these periods of rest, people were to spend time together. Sabbath days/shmita years weren’t a solitary exercise, but rather a collaborative experience enriched by time spent together without the stress and strain of regular life demands.
• Rest is a gift. God modelled rest and designed our bodies to require it. This can seem like a limitation or deficiency. It is a gift. Regular rest is how the world works best. The environment, the animals, the people. We would all be better served – and our atmosphere would be a whole lot cleaner – if we all took one day a week off of production and consumption. But we don’t and our hearts are collectively restless.
• Rest should (often) come first. Unless something is of critical importance, if we feel our body or mind wilting, we need to listen. Our bodies are designed to provide feedback about when we need rest; it even offers cues on the type of rest we might currently require. But we’ve gotten good at – or been forced to – ignore those cues.
• Rest makes us more productive. While the whole point is to shy away from reducing ourselves to our level of production, rest does make us more productive. We make fewer mistakes, we present higher-quality work, and we feel more contentment in our labour when we’re adequately rested.
• Rest is not just sleep. Rest can look like making boxed macaroni and cheese for supper. Rest can look like saying No to a request. Rest can look like taking a walk or baking a cheesecake or puttering in the garden or listening to an opera or reading a book. Rest can look like sitting still. Rest can look like hiking a mountain.
• Rest looks different in certain seasons and for different people. Living with a newborn is not conducive to rest. Many jobs leave little to no wiggle room to get adequate rest. Rest to one person might be painting a room or ironing a pair of pants. Give me a paintbrush or an iron and I will burst into tears and my anxiety will spike to epic levels. What can we do for hours and feel actual joy? That’s likely a good place to start.
• Rest is – unfortunately – a privilege. The ability to rest tends to be heavily tied to socioeconomics. Again, this demonstrates the radical Biblical mandate of Sabbath and Shmita being for everyone – regardless of their gender, race, or social status.
• Rest is worth it. Rest provides a time to heal, recharge, reflect, connect, and find meaning.

I wanted to provide a summary from the year so I’ve posted all the relevant links, key takeaways, and favourite quotes from each month below. There isn’t anything new or startling, so please feel free to skip this part! Time is precious – I don’t want to waste yours.

You might note there is no post for December because I didn’t stop to take notes on how I implemented rest. This holiday season was especially lovely and I do think a lot of that contentment stems from my more relaxed approach and a desire to prioritize rest and connection over busyness and efficiency.

Thanks to everyone who has been so encouraging throughout the last year and I’m wishing each of you transformative periods of rest in 2025.

JANUARY

POST | My Year of Shmita: January Recap

KEY TAKEAWAYS |

• I started napping more regularly. To circumvent my issue of sleeping too long and disrupting nighttime sleep, I started taking progressively shorter consecutive naps – 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes – until I felt rested. This worked well!
• Stop reading bad books! It’s okay to DNF!!!
• Screens. A time waster but, as a mother, they also provide me with time to rest.
• Interesting to consider time as a resource God gives us. A Biblical standard (not a rule!) is to tithe 10% of monetary resources. But we rarely discuss our use of time. We all have 168 hours each week and a Sabbath of time = ~17 hours set aside for rest.

FAVOURITE QUOTES |

• My rest does not need a reason.
• Just because something is in our capacity does not make it our responsibility.
• Distance is not always avoidance. Distance is sometimes the boundary we need in order to heal from the hurt caused by others, and avoid reinjury.
• Quitting is not always failure. It can sometimes be the only way to give ourselves the care we need to make room for something new.
• It does not benefit anyone when we live our lives running on fumes. Love is an action, a thing in motion. Therefore it requires fuel. Only a full tank can go the distance.
• Create your own finish lines. Let there be as many as you want, and let there be many.
• How we spend our time defines who we are. There is no magical future. Today is our future.
• You are not ruined or broken or a failure. You are simply in pain.
• Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul.
• The Sabbath…[is] an opportunity to mend our tattered lives; to collect rather than to dissipate time. Labour without dignity is the cause of misery; rest without Spirit is the source of depravity.
• The Sabbath is me’en ‘olam ha-ba, which means: somewhat like eternity or the world to come. All our life should be a pilgrimage to the seventh day; the thought and appreciation of what this day may bring to us should be ever present in our minds.
• The longing for the Sabbath all days of the week is a form of longing for the eternal Sabbath.
• Time is man’s greatest challenge…beyond our reach, beyond our power. It belongs exclusively to God.
• If your car is broken, you don’t try to find ways to repaint its chassis; most of our problems – and therefore our solutions, our peace of mind – lie within.
• Heaven is a place where you think of nowhere else.
• …it’s the rest in a piece of music that gives it resonance and shape.
• Hurry is a form of violence on the soul.
• Love takes time; hurry doesn’t have it.
• In some seasons we just have very little extra time to give away.
• Our schedule needs to align with our values.
• Shabbat – to stop/to delight; stopping and enjoying.
• Simplicity is an inward reality that can be seen in an outward lifestyle of choosing to leverage time, money, talents, and possessions toward what matters most.

FEBRUARY

POST | My Year of Shmita: February Update

KEY TAKEAWAYS |

• Biblical Sabbath was a counter-culture social equalizer. Women were to rest. Slaves were to rest. Immigrants were to rest. Everyone and everything got to rest.
• Shmita also carried with it profound generosity, most notably with forgiveness of debts, access to food for those who might be less fortunate, and release from slavery.
• I need to rest BEFORE I feel exhausted; am I listening to what my body is telling me?
• Screen time isn’t created equal. Some screen time is for connection, some is for redirection and distraction.
• Gratitude can help point me toward rest; it helps my mind relax and focus on the good.
• What about considering a time fast? Clear my schedule to see what I’m “feeding on” – what’s empty calories and what’s actually nourishing me?

FAVOURITE QUOTES |

• While our habits clothe us – they also unclothe us. Our habits expose our wounds, our insecurities, our idols, our addictions, our chaos…Our habits are us.
• When we cease working on our Sabbath, we live out the truth that our worth is not based on how much we accomplish or contribute to the world but on the simple glorious fact that we are a cherished child of God.
• Until the Ten Commandments…no civilization had ever given ordinary, working people a regular day off. The gift of the Sabbath was truly a unique and unprecedented gift…
• It is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.
• When people believe that their value comes from their accomplishments, it is especially hard to stop striving for these accomplishments.
• To the biblical mind, however, labor is the means towards an end and the Sabbath as a day of rest, as a day of abstaining from toil, is not for the purpose of recovering one’s lost strength and becoming fit for the forthcoming labor. The Sabbath is a day for the sake of life. Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work.
• Sabbath is a day for the sake of life.
• Our minds are Velcro for the negative and Teflon for the good.
• What feels like underscheduling is actually a much more realistic way to allow time for what I need to do.

MARCH

POST | My Year of Shmita: March Update

KEY TAKEAWAYS |

• Does the path I’m walking lead to a place I want to go? If I keep heading this way, will I like where I arrive? 
• I looked for rest in art – paintings, music, books! This was whimsical and fun.
• For the first time I reflected on the fact that Jesus healed a man with a chronic condition on the Sabbath (Mark 3). He could have waited for another day…but He didn’t because the Sabbath was never about rules and legalism. It was a gift to humanity.
• Time has a lot to do with social morality. We think of time as neutral…but it’s not. We fight for time!
• Leaving the land fallow: allows hidden nutrients to come to the surface, naturally rids the land of crop pests, improves capacity to hold moisture, saves money.
• Sometimes I need to give myself permission to rest first and work second.
  

FAVOURITE QUOTES |

• …burnout isn’t always the result of giving too much; sometimes it’s the result of trying to give something you don’t have to give in the first place.
• Work is “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” That’s what you’re looking for – the intersection between what you love and what your world needs.
• …the Sabbath is a memorial. At Sinai it looks back to Eden [creation, God’s glory], but in Deuteronomy it looks back to Egypt [God’s deliverance of the Israelites].
• …we are made in [God’s] image. God works, so we work. God rests, so we rest.
• If we could stop layering guilt atop ourselves every single day, what could we accomplish?
• …time is how you spend your love [Zadie Smith]; perhaps it’s worth asking how we can manage our love rather than our time?
• …we forgo what we enjoy for something we deem more noteworthy.
• Just as storms have seasons, the triggers that cause me pain or distress come in patterns. I can’t prevent them; I can only do my best to soothe this particular cycle until it dies out. Then I look around me at the land that has been flattened and destroyed, as if a cyclone has swept across my life. I begin to pick up the pieces and rebuild, but I never lose sight of the sky, knowing the wind can pick up again anytime.
• If nothing in nature blooms all year, why should you?
• Minimalism is the art of knowing how much is just enough.
• [Thoreau] asks us to treat the minutes of our life as a concrete and valuable substance – arguably the most valuable substance we possess – and to always reckon with how much of this life we trade for the various activities we allow to claim our time.
• No one thinks of time as a moral entity. We think of it as a mathematically neutral one. But what was the labour movements fight for shorter days and workweeks about, if not the social morality of time. And how about the way we’re always recalibrating our feelings for our friends…based on how many minutes they’ve kept us waiting.
• Sabbath is both a day and an attitude to nurture such stillness. It is both time on a calendar and a disposition of the heart.
• The Chinese join two characters to form a single pictograph for busyness: heart and killing.
• …a good definition of Sabbath: imitating God so that we stop trying to be God.
• Slaves don’t rest. Slaves can’t rest. Slaves, by definition, have no freedom to rest. Rest, it turns out, is a condition of liberty.
• The truth is, we’re always a bit restless. We’re supposed to be. This is not a flaw in our faith, it is faith’s substance. It is a divine ruse to keep us from making permanent settlement this side of eternity. Our citizenship is in heaven.

APRIL

POST | My Year of Shmita: April Update

KEY TAKEAWAYS |

• It’s hard to observe a digital Sabbath when no one else is committed to doing it as well. When one person does it, the act becomes a liability. When everyone does it, the act becomes a liberation.
• Sometimes we’re forced to rest; case in point, when a child breaks their thumb.

FAVOURITE QUOTES |

• The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?
• This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet.
• …my greatest skill has been to want but little.
• I love a broad margin to my life.
• Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears…
• The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise.
• Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things.
• Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine to-morrow.
• I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.
• Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, it if be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion.
• Personality is not your destiny – it’s your tendency.
• …seeking advice doesn’t reveal a lack of confidence. It reflects respect for another person’s competence.
• It’s easy for people to be critics or cheerleaders. It’s harder to get them to be coaches. A critic sees your weaknessess and attacks your worst self. A cheerleader sees your strengths and celebrates your best self. A coach sees your potential and helps you become a better version of yourself.
• [Perfectionists]…fail to realize that the purpose of reviewing your mistakes isn’t to shame your past self. It’s to educate your future self.
• Relaxing is not a waste of time; it’s an investment in well-being.

MAY

POST | My Year of Shmita: May Update

KEY TAKEAWAYS |

• Once again…a digital Sabbath is hard. I do secretly hope this will become mainstream and everyone I know will start setting aside one day a week to stay off technology. Until then, it’s doubly hard to do this as an individual. Also, we lack cultural triggers for rest – the concept of Sabbath had so many nuances that it provided a concrete framework for an entire people group to follow.
• I need to set a bedtime…and stick with it! 10:30 pm is ideal.
• It’s fun to read comic books.
• Usually, being busy is a choice.

FAVOURITE QUOTES |

• What can you do for hours without effort and feel all kinds of joy?
• The Lazy Genius Golden Rule says that you are your own friend. You’re not a project. You’re not something to be fixed and sculpted and assessed on a daily basis. You’re a person of value as you are right now, and that person deserves your kindness because she is your friend.
• You weren’t knit together in your mother’s womb so you could run after a moving finish line. You’re tired because you’re trying to overcome the world, but we can take heart because the God of the universe has already done that.
• …we ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed.
• As a culture, we have translated speed into being a virtue. If you are busy, if you get things done quickly, if you move quickly throughout the day, it expresses success. You’re achieving.
• In contemporary money culture, to be at leisure, to be idle, is to be irrelevant. Daniel Gross
• [Leisure can be defined as doing:] something with no other aim than that it refreshes the soul or to choose to do nothing at all.
• Leisure in Greek is “skole”; a time of learning and reflection; cultivating oneself and one’s passions.

JUNE

POST | My Year of Shmita: June Update

KEY TAKEAWAYS |

• I thought a lot about my new little mantra of As much as I need for as long as it takes. 
• I thought a lot about what gives me “oxygen“.
• I need to care for myself (and others) not CONTROL myself and others.

FAVOURITE QUOTES |

• But the other reason we might not realize some everyday process is broken is that it isn’t broken to begin with – and that the inconvenience involved, which might look like brokenness from the outside, in fact embodies something essentially human.
• Worry, at its core, is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again and again and again – as if the very effort of worrying might somehow help forestall disaster. The fuel behind worry, in other words, is the internal demand to know, in advance, that things will turn out fine…

JULY

POST | My Year of Shmita: July Update

KEY TAKEAWAYS |

• Planning often paves the way for rest. It takes work to schedule vacations at the lake, but that planning pays off. What ROI am I likely to get from a particular decision?
• Certain things scream “summer” rest – interesting to consider how rest might look different depending on the season.
• Therapy is worth the time. Therapy helps my brain calm down and rest. But it is work and it is exhausting and I do need rest afterward.
• Life can throw some really, really big curve balls and that impacts how I approach rest.

FAVOURITE QUOTES |

• 2 Kings 2:16b – I was gobsmacked by a verse about “chariots of fire” which felt like it was (literally) Heaven sent.

AUGUST

POST | My Year of Shmita: August Update

KEY TAKEAWAYS |

• August felt like my first “true” month of rest in 2024. It was glorious.
• I thought quite a bit about how money intersects with themes of rest.
• Since we spent much of August on the road, I also considered how to rest while away from home. I watched documentaries instead of reading non-fiction on the plane which felt very indulgent and fun. I napped on public transit. We took time each day to unwind, leaving buffer to watch TV, lounge around the table eating ice cream, or take a hot shower.

FAVOURITE QUOTES |

• Nothing! The books I did read didn’t provide me with any noteworthy quotes related to themes of rest. Ditto for September, October, November, and December. The quote train is over!

SEPTEMBER

POST | My Year of Shmita: September Update

KEY TAKEAWAYS |

• I deserve to be here. I deserve to take up space. Such a short sentence that encapsulates the last three years of my life. Such an important lesson and mantra.
• I need to rest when I’m sick. I need to rest when I’m unhappy. The fastest path to healing is generally a path dotted with rest stops.
• As a socially-agile introvert, I do end up spending quite a bit of time with people. When I do, I always need a wind-down period. Ideally, I’ll stop social events early enough that my hour of alone time doesn’t force me to stay up too late. This is a tricky balance. I’ll feel utterly exhausted, but loathe going right to bed without some time to unwind.

OCTOBER

POST | My Year of Shmita: October Update

KEY TAKEAWAYS |

• I love October. The end.
• There is a difference between how we rest and why we rest.
• If our worth is tied to our productivity, what message does that send to people with physical or intellectual barriers?
• Sometimes we have to rest inside discomfort. Yin yoga is a new thing for me – turns out I’m a big fan!
• A Sabbath gives me time to be…human. To grieve, to process, to wrestle. It doesn’t all have to be about gratitude for good emotions. We need to use that time to tackle the areas of our life where we feel hurt and grief.

NOVEMBER

POST | My Year of Shmita: November Update

KEY TAKEAWAYS |

• It’s okay to complete challenges without fully adhering to the standard guidelines. Before starting NaBloPoMo I laid out some ground rules, stuck with them, and really enjoyed the experience far more as a result!
• It’s okay to take a sick day, to skip a optional event, to say No.
• Planning ahead gives me the chance to rest later.
• It can be helpful to assign tasks a hierarchy of importance. Rest may need to take top billing.

DECEMBER

No post! No takeaways. Just…life.

Your turn.

• What ideas do you have for improving your restful/leisure time?
• What can you do for hours and feel joy?
• What’s your single biggest barrier to getting enough rest?