You Are BelovedSample

 Our lives must be rooted in rest and peace. It all begins there. One way this is practiced in the normal Christian life is in the context of work and the Sabbath. Sunday is the first day of the week, not the last. That may be a surprise, as Monday at least feels like the first day. But look at your calendar: Sunday is almost always the first one on the left. But we don’t go to bed on Saturday thinking, well, tomorrow I've got to start my week  I wonder how this one's going to go? Instead, we pair the last and first days of the week together as a weekend, thinking of those two days as a reward for suffering through the first five.

Many of us work really hard at jobs we don’t really love, arriving dog-tired at the weekend to receive our “reward” for enduring a week of hell. In other words, we spend five days unhappy in the hopes of inheriting two days of joy. But it doesn’t always work out this way. Typically, when we get to the weekend, we spend a lot of that time watching TV or wandering aimlessly around on our phones. Somehow, we find ourselves staying busy with random stuff, and we don’t really feel like it was all we hoped it would be. Many of us joke about how it feels when, on Sunday afternoon, say around two o’clock, we get this looming feeling that we’re going to have to go to work or school the next day.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

As Christians, we think about our weeks differently. Our first day of the week is not Monday, a day of labor. It’s Sunday, a day or rest and worship. We gather with our church, where we realign our lives with the Word of God and connect deeply with friends and family. We have music, sermons, and stories, as well as special events such as family-night suppers, chili cook-offs, or game nights that remind us to let go of work — to let go of the grind and have a day of fun and relaxation that really counts. The week begins from a place of rest and worship so that we can enter our work week with the call of God. Then, we are able to live from a place of His power.