Don’t steal. Don’t murder. Don’t commit adultery. Most Christians take commandments 6-8 pretty seriously. But when it comes to commandment #4 (keep the sabbath day) it all seems to get a bit vague.
I’m from the last generation in England who remember when everything used to close on a Sunday (Sunday trading was made legal here in 1994). That cultural memory of sabbath rest got reinforced when I felt a missional call into the field of politics in the early/mid 2000s. I rapidly discovered that politics was a 7-days-a-week operation, and if I agreed to attend events on Sundays, go out delivering leaflets and knocking doors on Sundays, or answer emails and messages on Sundays, there was no turning back. So what had been an unconscious habit became a practise in my slowly forming OMS rule of life. (incidentally I was frequently told that you couldn’t win elections or the respect of your peers if you didn’t offer “100% commitment”. It turned out that neither was true.)
Coming out of that season I thought that I was in a pretty good place regarding receiving God’s precious gift of sabbath rest. Then Steve Jobs begat* the iPhone, and the iPhone begat many other smartphones, and smartphones begat a multi-billion dollar information industry whose success and profits depend on capturing and holding your attention, 7 days a week. I started to notice that a life-giving spiritual practise was gradually being eroded from behind. I don’t know how many times I was being sucked into ‘looking at stuff’ on my phone on a Sunday, but it was a lot.
First attempt at a fix was to turn it off altogether. Great in theory, but it did make it tricky for my mum to get hold of me for a chat. Then I belatedly discovered that my phone can set up something called a ‘focus’. Mine is called ‘sabbath’, and it runs from midnight to midnight on Sundays (I know others use different 24 hour periods, especially those in church leadership for whom Sunday is a working day). It basically turns off every noise, alert, badge, or other form of digital interruption that the device is capable of generating, apart from letting the phone ring if it’s from immediate family. It also presents me with a single minimalist home screen and won’t let me see any other apps unless I run a rather fiddly search for them.
So far it seems to work. Those little reminders of tasks-to-be-done are now far out of sight, and from the amount of times I reach for it only to discover that I can’t ‘just’ check my diary or the weather or the name of the capital of Burkina Faso it’s also stopping a whole world of distractions that I didn’t even know I had.
Exodus says that ‘the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy’. It turns out that the blessing is still there, if only we will submit ourselves to going along with it.
(*meaning ‘gave birth to’ – familiar to anyone who has read the traditional King James version of the Bible)