My mother's family took great pains to set aside the Sabbath as a day of rest. Games were not to be played. Chores were put on hold. The Sunday dinner was largely prepared on Saturday. Even the Sunday newspaper was put on the shelf until Monday morning.

As a boy, I was grateful my mother did not seek to impose the same regimen on our family. A whole day without doing anything? To my young mind it sounded like a weekly purgatory.

Now I see it differently. The stern rules governing the Sabbath were not designed to impose a burden, but to protect a gift. A day of rest is not a day "with nothing to do." Rather, as someone said about leisure, it is a time for doing the important things: pausing, reflecting, catching our breath, talking with family and friends, taking stock of our lives, perchance to dream.

The Sabbath, what Babylonians called "the day of quieting the soul," is a chance to avoid the irony of what governs most of our days. The things that are most important in life are also the most easily postponed. The daily goals press in on us. The lifetime goals - the things of lasting importance - are so easily shuffled aside. We can postpone the grocery shopping just so long and a leaky roof will receive our immediate attention. However, we can postpone time with our families or time with God in worship almost indefinitely.

Pascal wrote that most human problems could be traced back to our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Instead, we rush about, tending to seemingly urgent needs, bouncing from one task to another like a ball in a pinball machine. We no longer work to live, but live to work. We are too busy to do much more than skim across the rich depths of life. I am afraid that all work and no play is making dull boys of us all.

At the very least, a day of rest can demonstrate that we are not indispensable after all. The world can really function without us. That is important to know, if not always comforting. And it is in the quiet moments, the open spaces of our days, that we can attend to the presence of God.

One of the difficult things about being a minister is that I must affirm some things that I find very hard to fulfill in my own life, and keeping the Sabbath is surely one. In my household, if the Sunday papers go unread, it is not because sitting down to read it would be too much like work. It is because it would be too much like rest. I too live in a hurried world of long hours and split seconds. Work and business close in on every minute.

So, instead of keeping the Sabbath, I - like many of you - take vacations. My family and I have just returned from several weeks on a stretch of beach where we kept pace with the slow and steady beat of a different drummer, the waves of the Atlantic. It was a quiet time, far from the bustle and hum that fills our days. We had a chance to look out at the ocean and see reflected there some of the enormity and power of God.

Before we left, the "indispensable me" felt pulled in a thousand different directions. After our time away, all things seem possible again. Those weeks did for me what a good Sabbath is designed to do. We must admit that a vacation is no Sabbath because it is not fully integrated with the rest of our lives. The Sabbath, that wondrous gift, still waits to be received with gratitude.