Church Work: Friday is Family Day

So a couple of weeks ago, I started a Friday series called “Church Work” to talk about all the joys and challenges of ministry, and to talk about the practical side of working or volunteering in a local church.

But I thought it’s only fair that I let you know something right up front about this particular series, especially because it overlaps with what I hope to actually do here.

So here goes:

This post will be on the internet on Friday, but I won’t. I won’t read or know about any comments you write for a day or two. Because Friday is family day.

And on family day we have our cell phones turned off and our computers shut, we spend time in the real world walking around the neighborhood with our kids and playing “Around the World” or baseball or reading stories out loud to each other.

Every Thursday night, our entire family gathers around a table and we light a candle and say a Sabbath prayer and eat Little Caesar’s pizza (you know…as in the Hebrew tradition).

We thank God for the week and the upcoming day of rest, and then my kids hide my iPhone (more than a few times they have hidden it and then forgot where it was the next day) and we pull out the mattresses from the kids rooms and watch a movie or play board games and all fall asleep together in the living room.

We’ve done this ritual for 3 years now, and I can’t tell you how much it means to all of us.

It keeps my days from just running into one continuous blur, and it keeps my identity from getting too intermingled with my job. It helps my family know that they are my first ministry, and it reminds me that I am not nearly as important as I am tempted to think.

When I first started ministry, I had an older minster tell me that the reason he worked 7 days a week was because the Devil never took a day off. Looking back on it, it seems to me that the Devil is a really bad example for ministry.

Yes, God is always at work, but that means that I don’t have to be.  I can take a break and enjoy the good world and life that God has set in front of me.

I would encourage anyone in ministry, heck, anyone who is a follower of Jesus to take Sabbath seriously, and wherever you are at in your life, I hope this post gets you to at least consider it.

But if it does, I won’t know. Because today is family day.

Image from Buffer with Author Modification