"My husband works six days a week, ten hours a day, and I work about twenty-five hours a week. Sunday is the only day we have to get anything done around the house."

"I wish I didn't have to work on Sunday," another woman confides, "but the boss wouldn't like it if I took Sundays off."

Sunday is just another workday now. At best, this former day of rest has become a chance to catch up on household chores and errands before the new week.

Is there any way to get our Sunday back?

Not all cultures have recognized a day of rest. Only the Jews kept it as a day of total abstinence from labor. It was a sign of their covenant with God. The early Christians observed the Lord's Day in a Greco-Roman culture that carried on business as usual seven days a week.

Most business functions in our society are performed all week; someone has to handle the cash registers and gas pumps. And many of us desperately need the work. The person who holds down two or three jobs is not doing all this for the fun of it.

Surely, this was also true way back when. Ancient Romans or Egyptians would tell us they worked so much because they had no choice.

Was life, then, easier for the people of Israel? Surely not. It was even worse. For a seminomadic tribe on the edge of the desert; hunting, gathering, tilling, and harvesting are a tenuous way of life. Famine, drought, insects, accident, fire and disease could destroy a whole people.

Imagine, in the face of this, that God (It had to be God; no human being in his or her right mind would have come up with such a nutty idea.) has the chutzpah to suggest , nay, command, that this people take one full day and do absolutely nothing.

It is pretty funny, when you think about it. God tells these half-starved desert dwellers to take every seventh day and completely avoid doing anything useful.

"What if the hay needs to be raked or it looks like rain?"

"But what if there is no water in the house?"

"But, but, but, but..."

Why such a fuss over a day off?

Simple? This is a matter of life and death! What does God want them to do? Starve?

Practically, it just cannot be done. The Jews should have disappeared from history a couple of millennia ago, victims of their own religious idiocy.

The odd thing is they did not. The Hebrews somehow got by on six days of labor for every seven. They did not work any harder the rest of the week either; they were already working as hard as they could.

Only two possible explanations exist: dumb luck, or the grace of God.

Could it be that the main purpose of the Sabbath was to let people know, by experience, that they did not keep themselves alive, but that God did?

A concrete demonstration of this has been going on for centuries and we have hardly noticed. From the serfs of the Middle Ages, to pioneers carving out a life in the New World, people have been wasting better than a month of Sundays every year in divinely sanctioned sloth and indolence (peppered here and there with various forms of worship), while all around them fields went untended and trees uncut. What are we doing here, anyway? Our ancestry should not have survived long enough to beget us.

Try a less threatening demonstration: sit still for 15 minutes. Forget the TV, the dishes, the bills, the letter to Aunt Jo, the phone. Do not think deep thoughts, just sit.

It's not that easy, is it? Letting go for a whole day is infinitely worse.

Almighty God requests the privilege of being allowed to take the world off your shoulders and manage your affairs once a week. Just leave the driving to God.

Why do we find it so hard to comply? Because we do not trust God. There is the nagging fear that, when it comes to the pinch, God cannot (or will not) sustain us.

Keeping the Sabbath, for Christian or Jew, peasant or factory worker, is still a leap of faith.

What if the boss doesn't like it? What if we cannot pay the bills? What about the house?

But, but, but...

The offer still stands.