Finding a Rhythm of Rest

or how to take a nap

Rest

After sitting on the floor and playing with your kids (obvious), the next best advice for becoming Famous at Home is to take a nap. (And get your family to take one too.)

The world has been moving at a pace that we can’t handle. It isn’t this week or this year or this decade or millennia. It has always moved at a greater pace, scope, and scale than our tiny bits of self can handle. Consider this passage from the Old Testament (Exodus 20).

⁸ “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. ⁹ Six days you shall labor and do all your work, ¹⁰ but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. ¹¹ For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

Sabbath

Okay, we are sitting around 1500 BCE, and one of the Ten Commandments is to ensure you take a rest every week. It even hints at the Genesis creation account where God instituted rest from the get-go. If you are doing the math, that’s around 5500 BCE, or when humanity first figured out agriculture.

Just stew on that for a minute. One of the oldest texts we have points back to 7500 years from today and says, “yeah, we needed rest then too.” I am not arguing that the rest is only for Yahweh followers either. And Yahweh didn’t say that either.

Read above. The day is for you, your kids, your servants, and your animals. Everything needs a rest.

What does Rest look like?

Activities or lack thereof

I have read several books on the Sabbath, and they all differ on what constitutes restful activity, because we are all different people living in different times. So instead of telling you what to do, here are some things to be suspicious of, but aren’t outright wrong to do on your Sabbath.

1. Social Media

2. Your job (whatever that is - p.s. hard one for stay-at-home parents)

3. Too much of anything

   e.g., Rest should help bring us into a state of peace and fulfillment. Too much sleep makes me groggy and angry.

   

When to do it?

The jury is out on this one, too. I haven’t ever had to pull a true double or triple shift to make ends meet, so my advice to y’all would be to rest when possible. For the rest of us, two common ideas recur across the literature.

1. The first is to set up a day every week. Ancient and modern Jews go from Friday at sundown to Saturday at sundown. Many Christians devote all day Sunday to the keeping of the Sabbath. Many Christian ministers (who work on Sunday) choose another day to rest. This is hard to do with kids, society, and genuinely good things pulling in every direction.

2. The second is to honor a set time for each day. It doesn’t always have to be the same hours and minutes each day. But it is the intentional setting aside of a time to push away from the stress of the day. Many of the dads I have spoken to over the years have told me their commute functions well for this. I say more power to you, so that you don’t find other people driving around you stressful. Regardless, the same rules apply above.

   Example:

   Some of the most successful men I have spoken to about this carve out a 45-minute chunk around 2-3 PM. They choose to nap for 22-25 minutes and then read something unrelated to work on either of the other ends. Those guys make seven figures, so I don’t know how well something like that would go on the factory floor… or with three children at home. But the principle of rest and the seriousness with which the C-suite is beginning to take it show you how powerful it is for the most productive people on the planet.

   PRO TIP: To make this happen for your family, plan it out! It’s Monday night. Put some thought into it. Discuss with your significant other and create a plan to try it out. Then, plan to repeat the process, making adjustments as needed.

What My Family Does

So, what do I do? Well, we have rest time every day. My youngest still naps, so that’s an easy way to quell my older kids. For the older kids, there is more flexibility with how they spend it. Usually, it is a time of creativity for them. They color, play Legos, or (occasionally, though it’s against the overall policy…) listen to music. My eldest likes to make up games - or if a friend is over and they do whatever they’re into (Pokémon, Nerf wars, board games) at the moment (usually inside for a change).

The point is to give all the kids a break from each other and a break from me. I am the enemy and love that unites them. And each of us can all be a bit much. In the past, we have set up a Friday night/Saturday morning thing. We still try to have Family Movie Night at least once a week (with popcorn and candy or a sweet treat after Veggie Dinner Night).

It’s not fancy. But we all get together and learn to choose the best parts of each member of the family instead of dreading our weaknesses.

However, I know many families have started to observe rest time. Maybe it’s Saturday morning at the soccer fields or a campout every third Saturday—perhaps it's gardening, or if you have teenagers sleeping in on a weekend. The best thing I know to do is to learn from others and then experiment with my family to see what works.

If you have any more questions for me, drop them in the comments or reply to the email. If you have suggestions, please comment. We need a collective wisdom. And as always, share this with someone because we all need a tip or trick to help us out.

In Faithful Fatherhood

Jacob Pannell