The Sabbath Saves Us from Achievement and Productivity
Travis West
4 min read ⭑
A few years ago, I decided to teach a new course titled “The Art of the Sabbath.” I had sensed for years that our seminary students were exhausted, overwhelmed and feeling burned out even before they accepted their first call to full-time ministry. I felt a responsibility to help my students imagine what a healthy approach to ministry might look like, one that honored their human limits while preserving their passion and capacity to pour into the people they would minister to for the long haul — people who were also exhausted, overwhelmed and on the verge of burnout. At the same time, I felt like my own Sabbath practice was stagnant and uninspired. I hoped that teaching this class would stimulate new creativity and intentionality in my practice as well. What I did not anticipate is how shining a Sabbath light on my students’ lives would end up exposing my own life’s unhealthy patterns.
The whole semester was an extended immersion in irony. I realized how driven I was by perfectionism as I worked relentlessly to create the perfect content to convince my students to embrace their imperfections. I felt ashamed when boasting to myself that I worked a fifteen-hour day that included writing a lecture about the perils of productivity shame. I raced through my days while advising my students to slow down and reject the premise that a go-go-go lifestyle is the path to success. I felt the sting of conviction when teaching my students to resist the self-sabotage of overcommitting and saying yes to everything as compensation for a persistent fear of deficiency, when that was precisely what I had done for years.
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The nagging sense that my life was out of sync with the subject matter of the class haunted me all semester, but I was too busy to stop and listen. Well, to be truly honest, I was too afraid to stop and listen. I was certain the Sabbath would wag its finger at me and say, “Aha! I caught you, you hypocrite!” As ridiculous as it sounds, that fear drove me. So I kept my head down and pushed through, striving to make this the best, most transformative, most restful class ever.
Eventually, I ran out of gas. Around week twelve of the fourteen-week semester I crashed and threw my hands in the air, shouting to the proverbial skies that I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t sustain the pace or maintain equilibrium under the pressure I had put on myself to be perfect and always have it together. When I finally stopped and listened to what the Sabbath was saying to me, what I heard sounded a lot different than what I’d expected.
The Sabbath didn’t want to expose me as a fraud and a failure. It wanted me to slow down, take a breath and listen to my anxiety and my fear. It wanted me to see my struggles with Sabbath-keeping not as a moral failure but an opportunity to empathize with my students, to normalize their struggles by sharing mine — and then for us to pause together and listen to what our struggles could teach us about how we’ve been formed and where we needed to grow.
Ultimately, I learned that a primary purpose of the Sabbath is to disrupt the habituated ways we show up to our lives. Our work-related habits are some of the most deeply formed and unconscious of all our habits. And the stakes are high when these habits are tied to our livelihoods and the nurturing of our children and family life. But for so many, the status quo — the pervasive cultural forces shaping how and why we work — is, well, not working. The Sabbath’s goal is to provoke us to protest these forces and the anti-Sabbath ways they compel us to live so we can begin living beyond them. Changing our habits and resisting the pull to produce, to rush, to stress, to control is challenging, slow work. It can feel like we are cracking open. And yet, as songwriter Leonard Cohen reminded us, the cracks are “how the light gets in.”
“The Sabbath reminds us that the journey — and not the destination — is the source of our delight and purpose and value. And delight is what the Sabbath longs for us to experience — not just once a week on our Sabbath day, but every day.”
For people who are driven, ambitious, goal-oriented and susceptible to believing they are what they do, the Sabbath space of not doing can be disorienting, raising the uncomfortable question, “Who am I when I’m not achieving or producing?” For people who are driven not by ambition but a deep sense of shame, who use achievement to secure the affirmation they crave and to silence the voices telling them they’re not worthy, the Sabbath pause from doing can be similarly unsettling, turning up the volume of the inner critic’s question “Who are you when no one is praising you for what you’ve accomplished?”
The radical part of Sabbath rest is that it enables us to begin seeing through the facade of achievement and the false hope it holds out for us to earn love or become worthy of it. Sabbath rest is radical because through it we can learn to become less dependent on external factors that we think will help us feel good about ourselves, and instead find ways to feel our intrinsic goodness in every part of our lives. Simple Sabbath practices help us take baby steps toward letting go of crippling perfectionism and incessant productivity shame. They remind us that the Sabbath is not an opportunity to improve ourselves, but to accept ourselves as we are: perfectly imperfect and becoming more whole. They empower us to fill each of our steps with meaning and joy. The Sabbath reminds us that the journey — and not the destination — is the source of our delight and purpose and value. And delight is what the Sabbath longs for us to experience — not just once a week on our Sabbath day, but every day. Reconnecting our work to God’s presence and activity and reorienting our relationship with productivity and achievement are a solid foundation on which to build a house of delight where we can dwell throughout the week when we’re doing whatever it is we give our time and life-energy to.
Travis West is Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan. He is the author of four books, including, most recently, The Sabbath Way: Making Room in Your Life for Rest, Connection, and Delight (releasing June 2025, Tyndale Refresh). When he’s away from the classroom and the writing desk, he can be found searching for wonder while walking the fields near his house, experimenting with nature photography, watching a movie or hanging out with his wife Mariah, his most consistent source of delight and amazement.
Taken from “The Sabbath Way: Making Room in Your Life for Rest, Connection, and Delight” by Travis West. Copyright © 2025. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers.
