Travis West is a seeker of Sabbath, wonder and delight. He is a Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, and the author of four books. His most recent book, “The Sabbath Way: Making Room in Your Life for Rest, Connection, and Delight,” releases in June of 2025. Travis’s deepest desires are to “spread joy, defend delight, promote play and help people reconnect with their truest selves.”

In this interview, Travis shares how he has battled the giants of shame and inadequacy and how he grew in self-compassion when he embraced his limitations. He shares the story of why sharing a meal with his wife is something they will never take for granted, talks about the practice that has “saved his life” continually for almost 20 years, and explains why he and his wife lock their phones in the basement for 24 hours once a week.

QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT

The meals we enjoy are about so much more than the food we eat. So, how does a “go-to” meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind your web bio?

Two meals at two different restaurants, both in West Michigan, separated by over twenty years, tell something of the journey my wife and I have been on that dips beneath the glossy surface of the author bio. The first meal happened on July 10, 2003, at our rehearsal dinner, the night before our wedding. We held it at The Pita House, a Lebanese gyro shop not far from Calvin College, from which we had graduated the year before. We were the first couple ever to hold their rehearsal dinner at The Pita House, and it started a friendship with one of the owners that we cherished for many years. That meal held the promise of our life together. Filled with hope and garlic and hummus, we looked forward to a life of adventure, service and delight.

But on our honeymoon we discerned that all was not well. To make a very long story quite short, we discovered we both had mono. A year later, long after I had recovered, my wife still had active mono, which they called chronic mono, or chronic fatigue. From there her health challenges built like a snowball free-falling down a hill in a blizzard. Seventy-five doctors later, she had received several diagnoses, but no real answers. Beyond the profound fatigue, her other primary symptoms were digestive, which meant she tried every diet ever invented. Food was not primarily a source of life and connection and joy, but of fear and isolation and pain. Every meal she ate had to be made fresh, at home, using the most specific ingredients. We didn’t go to a restaurant together for years and years.

Then, a couple years ago, her health started slowly returning. Her digestion improved to the point that we could eat out together again, which takes me to the second restaurant. Not far from our home is a Mexican place near the mall in Grandville, MI, called El Burrito Loco. Its walls are adorned with beautiful murals celebrating Mexican history and heritage, and its menu features dozens of traditional options. It was the first place we visited together after all those years. The first time we went there together, we split an order of chicken fajitas and wept tears of joy as we stuffed our faces with chicken, peppers, guacamole, rice and beans.

Those years of sickness and hardship and suffering instilled within each of us a refusal to take our lives for granted. Celebrating the little things, like chicken fajitas with extra shredded cheese, helps us savor our lives and feel connected to goodness, especially when goodness is hard to find.

a television set from the 1980s — PJ Gal-Szabo; Unsplash

QUESTION #2: REVEAL

We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests. So, what are yours? What so-called “nonspiritual” activity do you love engaging in that also helps you find essential spiritual renewal?

l love stories. And I especially love visual stories — by which I mean that I love to watch TV and movies. And by love I mean love. Getting lost in a story is one of my favorite experiences. I love wondering how Jason Bourne or Ethan Hunt is going to get out of this or that impossible situation. I love beautiful and creative cinematography, and I love thoughtful and clever writing. I love epic tales of hobbits and dragons or spies and thieves, as well as smaller stories of friendships won and lost, coming-of-age dramedies, or parents overcoming obstacles to save or defend or let go of their children or their marriages. I love it all.

However, I grew up in the 80s and 90s during the height of the early research on the effects of excessive TV watching on adolescent brain and psychological development. My mom was entirely convinced by this and tried everything in her power to break me of my viewing habits, which included a couple hours of viewing every day, if I could swing it with sports practices and homework. Her most memorable tactic was to create a chart with a box for every day of the week, spanning about six months. I began the six months with about $200 coming my way, but every show I watched subtracted from that total. I had to write the amount of TV I watched each day, and whatever I had left at the end they would pay me in cold, hard cash. They never paid me a dime.

While these tactics were ineffective at curbing my delight in movies, they were highly effective at infusing that delight with a deep sense of shame. For decades I felt a war inside myself every time I wanted to watch something. I was excited, but I also felt horrible, like I was wasting my time and therefore wasting my life. Interestingly, it was my commitment to Sabbath that has been helping me lose the shame I carried for so long and simply enjoy my delight in giving my time to this activity. Typically, “watching TV” would be on the “to-don’t” list for Sabbath, but my discovery of delight at the heart of Sabbath helped me accept this delight for what it is.

I should hasten to add that watching TV can also be a waste of time, and it’s a fine line between delight and escape. Sabbath does not endorse escape, but a deep and abiding presence. My journey in self-awareness has helped me discern when I’m seeking TV as an escape or a delight.

QUESTION #3: CONFESS

Every superhero has a weakness; every human, too. We're just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re all broken and in this thing together. So, what’s your kryptonite and how do you confront its power head-on?

I’ve been a seminary professor for 15 years. I have a PhD in Old Testament to go along with two masters degrees (MDiv and ThM) and a BA in Religion. I’m about as credentialed as any person could possibly be. Yet, despite all of this, I have never felt like I “belong” in the academy. My greatest challenge is feeling like I am “enough” — smart enough, disciplined enough, productive enough, successful enough, well-read enough — to make it as a professor. Despite my degrees, I generally expect that I am the dumbest person in the room, and I assume others’ ideas are better than my own.

My unorthodox path to the professoriate exposed these fears and assumptions. I joined the faculty of the seminary from which I had just graduated a year prior. I was the only member of the faculty without a doctorate, and I was not yet enrolled in a program. For someone who doesn’t suffer from chronic inadequacy syndrome (aka imposter syndrome), this may have been a shot in the arm and a boost to their confidence. They may have received the message, “We believe in you and want to help you develop your gifts for teaching.” The only message my inner critic told me was, “What are you doing here? You do not belong at the table with these brilliant people.”

Thankfully, I made it through those first couple of years, and now the fear of inadequacy is not as prevalent in my heart and mind. But that’s not to say it’s gone entirely. Part of my spiritual practice, which the Sabbath makes room for, is to embrace my essential goodness, my essential enough-ness. Sabbath reminds me I don’t have to earn love through hard work, productivity and sacrifice. I am enough right now. I am learning the truth of what poet Brad Aaron Modlin once wrote: “I am / is a complete sentence.”

QUESTION #4: FIRE UP

Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your current obsession? And why should it be ours?

I am a teacher, preacher, writer, speaker and Sabbath-seeker. My deepest desires are to spread joy, defend delight, promote play and help people reconnect with their truest selves.

As an author, my newest book is “The Sabbath Way: Making Room in Your Life for Rest, Connection, and Delight.” It is the culmination of a four-year process of writing and a seventeen-year process of living, experimenting, failing and learning. I am deeply passionate about the Sabbath and have experienced first hand its transformational power. There is an old Jewish saying, coined by Israeli journalist Ahad Ha’am, that says: “More than the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews.” The Fourth Commandment is to “keep the Sabbath.” But the beauty of Sabbath-keeping is that when you embrace it, it embraces you.

My wife and I have felt this in profound ways throughout our life together. More than we have kept the Sabbath, it has kept us. I can say without exaggeration that we are still married today because of this shared practice, which has held our tears and our fights and our pain and our laments as much as it has held our joy and our laughter and our play and our delight. Sabbath has helped weave the fibers of our souls together into a fabric that is stronger than life itself.

Beyond its benefits for relational connection and building trust and love and joy, I believe Sabbath is as relevant and urgent today as it has ever been. We live in an exhausted and lonely society that prioritizes productivity, achievement, consumption and financial success over all else. Sabbath is an act of protest against these messages and values, which diminish us, divide us and distract us. On Sabbath we say “no” to all of that so that we can say “yes” to abundance, playfulness, gratitude, presence, connection, enough-ness and, ultimately, to delight.

QUESTION #5: BOOST

Cashiers, CEOs, contractors or customer service reps, we all need grace flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it's God when it happens?

Dozens of times while I was writing “The Sabbath Way,” I forced myself to stay in my writing chair, head down, fingers poised over the keys with nothing to say. I’ve wasted hours that way over many years of writing. One week, near the end of the revision process, I was staring down a deadline for a chapter that I’d had to scrap and start over from scratch. It wasn’t going well. I had lost all my confidence and spent three and a half of the four days I’d cleared in my schedule to finish it just staring at my computer screen. I was thousands of words and several good ideas short of a completed chapter. I tried all the techniques I knew — walking, dancing, stretching, breathing, running errands. Nothing worked.

Finally, desparate, I shared with my wife how stuck I was. Even just saying it out loud began to shift something inside me. After a kind and empathetic word, she suggested I call my editor. It hadn’t even occurred to me to call her, even though she’d told me several times to do so in this sort of situation.

I didn’t want to reach out for help because I was terrified to admit I didn’t know what to write. I was afraid my editor would confirm my deepest fears: I wasn’t up to the task; I should never have tried to write a book like this. That’s not at all what she said, of course. She was brilliant, pastoral and encouraging. I felt seen, heard and affirmed. As soon as the conversation ended, I felt a resurgence of creative energy beginning to flow.

God isn’t just in the creativity — God is creativity. To create is to participate in creating God’s image in us. When I get in my own way, believe the lie of autonomy, or am too afraid to honor and accept my limits as a finite human being, I block the flow of divine creativity that wants to move through me into the world. We were created to create, but “it is not good for the human to be alone” (Genesis 2:18).

Crashing up against my limitations like I did writing “The Sabbath Way” is both painful and powerful. Embracing my limitations helps me grow in self-compassion. It also helps me acknowledge the universal truth that all creativity is collaborative, building on the work of others. I’ve also learned that being vulnerable and seeking help leads not only to better work, but also to greater joy and satisfaction in my work and a deeper sense of God’s Spirit flowing through me when I get out of my own way.

QUESTION #6: inspire

Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied habits that open our hearts to the presence of God. So, let us in. Which spiritual practice is working best for you in this season?

In her remarkable book “An Altar in the World,” Barbara Brown Taylor asks a simple yet profound question: What is saving your life right now? Without question, the practice that has saved my life over and over again for almost twenty years now is Sabbath.

My wife and I first encountered Sabbath during a seven-week stint during the summers of 2006 and 2007 near Jerusalem, where I was studying Biblical Hebrew. Everything seemed to shut down on Friday evening: busses didn’t run, Jewish shops closed, the streets emptied, the atmosphere changed. We practiced Sabbath because there was nothing else for us to do!

But when we got home and no one else was doing it, we realized we had to make it our own if we wanted that rhythm we’d fallen in love with to continue. It took many years, and it was extremely difficult to sustain in a culture that is anti-Sabbath to its core. It was also difficult to hold our commitment to Sabbath while also doing what was necessary to pursue two master’s degrees, a doctorate and then tenure. And for my wife’s part, it was confusing to discern what Sabbath-ceasing meant during her struggle with a chronic illness that prevented her from working, driving or partaking of typical human pleasures like eating delicious foods, traveling or hosting family and friends. Yet, through it all, the Sabbath held us; it pursued us even as we pursued it.

Our Sabbath practice is oriented toward abundance, life, flourishing and joy. Its intention is to make room in our lives for rest, connection and delight. My experience suggests that rigidity, legalism and over-emphasis on prohibitions inhibits the very things Sabbath wants to offer us. So we have adopted a more generous practice than we inherited. We don’t fret about doing it “wrong” or messing up. We make room for delight and then we show up. The Spirit does the rest.

For more specific information on how we practice, see my website, travis-west.com, and my book “The Sabbath Way: Making Room in Your Life for Rest, Connection, and Delight.”

QUESTION #7: FOCUS

Looking backward, considering the full sweep of your unique faith journey and all you encountered along the way, what top three resources stand out to you? What changed reality and your heart?

The most influential author whose books have impacted my thinking and my acting in the world in ways beyond my comprehension is rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. His classic work “The Sabbath” transformed what I imagined the Sabbath was for — what it “did” in us and through us. More than any other book, that little book rocked my world and altered its course. I have gone back to it over and over, and it never disappoints. I’ve also read many of his other books. While somewhat denser in nature, many of them are worth reading. Two of my favorites are “God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism,” and his classic called “The Prophets.” For an accessible entry into the scope of his work, I recommend “I Asked For Wonder,” a collection of short excerpts from Heschel edited by his student, rabbi Samuel Dresner.

Another book on Sabbath changed my life. I found Norman Wirzba’s book “Living the Sabbath” the summer I returned from Jerusalem. I was lost and overwhelmed, longing for a guide on this newfound Sabbath journey. His book had just been released, and the timing could not have been more perfect. It’s accessible, engaging and inspiring. He connected Sabbath to creation care in ways I’d never considered before, and it changed my behavior, all the way down to the food I ate.

I have been slowly developing a practice of reading poetry over the past 15 years. Growing up I assumed that since I was an athlete, I wasn’t allowed to like things like poetry. (Why on earth did I assume that?) Once I got over myself, I discovered a companion and a guide in my efforts to slow my life down to the speed of love as I attempted to anchor my life in Sabbath rhythms. James Crews’s trilogy of anthologies, collected now in a box set called “A Boxful of Poetry,” is an excellent place for anyone who wants to read accessible, delightful poems but doesn’t know where to begin. In these pages you won’t just fall in love with poetry, you will fall in love with the world all over again.

We all have things we cling to to survive or even thrive in our fast-paced, techno-driven world. How have you been successful in harnessing technology to aid in your spiritual growth?

While there are a number of ways technology facilitates our connection to each other, our wonder at the natural world and our endlessly inquisitive minds, I have found the most important spiritual practices regarding technology are practices that invite me to put it away for a time and cultivate my ability to be present and attentive to what is.

For example, to begin our Sabbath, my wife and I thank our phones for all the gifts they have given us throughout the week, and then we turn them off and put them in the basement for the next 24 hours. We used to just put them on airplane mode and stick them in a drawer in the kitchen. But before long we came up with some convenient reason to pull them back out—to let Google satisfy a curiosity that came up in our conversation, to check the schedule to see if we were available next Tuesday, to remember the name of that actor in that one show. Of course, once it was back in our hands, our thumbs took over. They would flip off airplane mode, and we’d get sucked back into its orbit of notifications, news updates, text messages and social media — all of which disrupted the spirit of slowness, unproductivity, wholeheartedness and peace that we were trying to cultivate together.

So now we put them away in a very inconvenient place and actually power them down. It is a fascinating experience every week. I still find myself wondering where my phone is throughout the day. I notice myself wanting to reach for it when there’s a lull in the conversation or when I go to the bathroom. But in the months we’ve practiced this we have found ourselves less distracted, less anxious and less rushed, while at the same time more rested, more present and more grateful.

If you try it, be sure to let the people you love know you won't be responding to messages for the day. This will alleviate the pressure you feel to be accessible 24/7, and it may also invite your friends to try something similar!

QUESTION #8: dream

God's continually stirring new things in each of us. So, give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?

While I was writing “The Sabbath Way,” and in the months since I finished, I’ve been thinking a lot about delight. I’ve been reading a lot of Ross Gay’s books, including “The Book of Delights, The Book of (More) Delights” and “Inciting Joy.” He’s been helping me realize delight is more than just an episodic experience we have here or there and is instead a way of life we cultivate by paying careful and fierce attention to our hearts and our lives. I believe a robust vision of delight is an antidote for a lot of the world’s ills.

Ross Gay helped me realize that delight is not separate from or the antithesis of suffering. Rather, it is what grows out of the intimacy we cultivate in how we meet each other in our suffering. That’s a paradigm shift for me with respect to both suffering and delight.

In our world today, there is so much to be anxious about, so much to fear. It feels like so many are seeking to divide us, diminish us and keep us small, too afraid to pursue our dreams and become our best, truest selves. Now, more than ever, we need to pour the light of our hearts into the world. Now, more than ever, we need to tap into our native joy and wear it proudly. Now, more than ever, we need to practice self-compassion and self-love, recognizing that we cannot love our neighbors if we do not love ourselves. Now, more than ever, we need to find ways of remembering that there is more that connects us than separates us, even when it feels like we are all living in different realities.

I hope to write about delight in a way that connects with these longings, these discoveries, these realities. It feels timely and important to me. I hope it does to you as well.

Travis and his wife have adopted a practice that he says has saved their lives over and over again through the years — a true Sabbath rest. Their Sabbath practice involves “abundance, life, flourishing and joy” while they make room for delight in their lives. Take a minute to reflect on your Sabbath day. If you’re like many of us, it probably looks similar to every other day of the week. But God has better plans for us. Spend some time asking God to show you what true Sabbath looks like, and ask him to show you how you can delight yourself in his goodness in new ways. How can you make room for rest, quiet, delight, beauty, wonder, presence?

Travis West