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and playfulness and joy and gratitude and attention and encouragement and silliness and presence we can and offer it to everyone we meet. We need to reconnect with our own delight, and we need the delight of others— just to survive.
The Sabbath gives us permission to prioritize delight one day every week. It makes room for us to embrace our delights, and so to come back home to ourselves, to return from exile. The hope is that, as our Sabbath practice brings us home to ourselves week after week, our Sabbath posture helps us show up to work and the rest of life with more and more of ourselves as well.
1. Maya Angelou, Love’ s Exquisite Freedom( New York: Welcome Books, 2011).
2. Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays( Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2022), 4.
3. Gay, 4.
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Adapted from The Sabbath Way: Making Room in Your Life for Rest, Connection, and Delight by Travis West, releasing in June 2025.
Travis West is professor of Hebrew and Old Testament at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan. His previous books, Biblical Hebrew: An Interactive Approach and The Art of Biblical Performance, advocate for incorporating performance, embodiment, and play into the process of learning biblical Hebrew and interpreting biblical stories. 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, going to a farmers market, watching a movie, or hanging out with his wife, who is his most consistent source of delight and amazement. 51