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Stories I ponder: We are necessary and superfluous

Lynne Baab • Thursday September 28 2017

More than 30 years ago, my husband and I lived in Israel for 18 months, experienced the Sabbath day, loved it, and adopted a Sabbath pattern when we returned to the US. We did this entirely on our own. In the early and mid 1980s we didn’t know of any other Christians who were interested in the Sabbath except as a quirk of Jewish culture.

In the late 1980s and then into the 1990s, Christians began writing about the Sabbath. Both Marva Dawn and Eugene Peterson were influential. After our years of observing a Sabbath with no support from others, Dave and...

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Two common questions about the Sabbath

Lynne Baab • Wednesday June 14 2017

I speak and teach a lot about the Sabbath because I have kept a Sabbath for more than 30 years. Plus I have written a book, a Bible study guide, and many articles about it. When I speak or teach, I get two questions quite frequently: what’s the difference between a Sabbath and a day off, and what do you do on your Sabbath? I’ll use some thoughts about the first question as a bridge to my answer to the second question.

A day off and a Sabbath are similar because they are both a day to stop working. Many people, however, have...

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Quotations I love: The Jerusalem Talmud on enjoying good things

Lynne Baab • Wednesday October 26 2016

Everyone must render an account before God of all the good things he beheld in life and did not enjoy. —The Jerusalem Talmud

I find it quite challenging to accept the notion that we have some sort of responsibility before God to enjoy the good things of life. For most of my adult life, I’ve had an inner dialogue running through my brain along these lines: “How can I truly enjoy this wonderful event when 22,000 children will die today of the effects of hunger?” [1] “How can I relish this beautiful weather when 11.4 million Syrians are displaced from their homes?”...

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Sabbath Keeping a decade later: What I do on the Sabbath

Lynne Baab • Thursday May 12 2016

The question about the Sabbath I get asked most often is what I do.

I’ll back up a bit and say that my book Sabbath Keeping: Finding Freedom in the Rhythms of Rest came out in 2005, and immediately began to sell well. In its first year, it sold more copies than all but one of my other books have sold in their lifetimes. Because of the strong sales, I got asked to write articles, I was interviewed by magazines, and I have gotten lots of emails from people I don’t know.

In the book, I described my Sabbath pattern in the decades...

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