293 - 7 Weekend Rhythms We Live By
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Show Notes:
During the week, we work, but during the weekends, we play. Today’s episode is all about seven weekend rhythms that we live by.
For the full episode, hit play above or read through below.
Let's talk about something that we all struggle with. Finding time to read the Bible. Picture this: You finally get your morning cup of coffee and you're ready for a moment of peace. But before you open your Bible, you hear tiny footsteps earlier than usual and before you know it, you're snuggling a kid on the couch answering their questions about breakfast or what's your favorite dragon or, “Can you print me a picture, mom?” At least that's what it is for me. Does this sound familiar to you? Well, you're not alone. As a mom myself, I can't tell you how much Dwell has changed my life. I am so thankful that when I can't sit down and open my Bible and physically read it, I can listen to it with the Dwell app.
I love that there are so many soothing voices to choose from. Plus they have beautiful background music options that create a calming experience and you can even adjust the speed of the narrator's voice to get things just right. Most recently, I've been starting each morning with the Dwell daily devotional. Just this last week, the timing was amazing. I had just been talking with my sister about something that the Lord was showing me and sure enough, the very next morning, the Dwell daily devotional was on the same subject and we were texting each other about it. It's just really neat to see how God weaves things together and I love it. It's the best audio devotional around I think. It dives deep into scripture. It's new every day. There's different readers and authors contributing.
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I am so excited to share today's episode with you. The longer I live, the more I really wholeheartedly believe God had it perfect from the beginning. Working six days and resting one is this lifelong cadence that just works really well for humanity. I know today I'm going to talk about seven weekend rhythms and I'll get to that in a second, but I can't get there without just mentioning how we really have begun to revolve our whole week around practicing a Sabbath.
I get messages from people all the time. Nancy, how do you actually do this? Like practically, what does this look like for you? Or, you know, is this even possible? Or like my kids are older and my kids are younger, or I don't think that, you know, this is working for me in my life right now, but how do you do it?I just want to know. So that's what this episode is about. It's about how we do it. I will say very humbly and honestly that we don't do this perfectly all the time. I want you to hear me on that. At the same time, I want you to hear me say that honoring and practicing the Sabbath in our family has completely changed our lives over the last two years. Like radically changed our lives. Our family culture is different. Our relationships are different. Our marriage is better. When God gives us a gift and a command like honoring the Sabbath, His blessings just chase you down when you actually do it. I'm here to just testify to that truth in our own life. So I know, our kids are, you know, ages 10 months to 10 years, and it's going to look different for us.I was going to say it looked different for us ten years ago, but if I'm honest, we were not practicing Sabbath ten years ago. We really just started this in earnest in the last two years.
That's why I can't stop talking about it because I really want people to understand it is possible. It is doable. You can make it happen, but you do have to sacrifice some things and reorder a lot of priorities in your life. You have to say no a lot and it's hard. It's countercultural. It's hard to not do all the birthday parties. To not do all the sports. We unashamedly just decline birthday invitations often on Saturdays. If it's family, we make that a priority and we go. But a lot of times, friend’s birthday parties, unless they're like really close friends, we just don't do it. Because if you start saying yes to one, you have to say yes to all. I had a friend the other day that was like, we're going to three or four different birthday parties today on their Saturday and I was like, I cannot. I can't do it. It's just, that's so tiring.
So we try to find other ways to bless our friends if that happens. But I'm just going to be very honest. The way that this works is because we have these rhythms in place and we say “no” to a lot of things. I know that that's maybe hard for some people and it's hard for us too. But that's how it has to work. I also know it's going to look different for us in ten years, like I said. But this is me being transparent right now with where we are and how life-giving it is for us. So let's jump into the seven rhythms of our weekend that are so life-giving for us. The more I thought about it, I kind of broke it into seven blocks because that's really how it works for us. I'm going to quickly read through the seven rhythms, and then I'm going to break them down for you.
So starting Friday afternoon, we have our Sabbath prep rhythm. Then Friday night, we have our Shabbat dinner, our Sabbath dinner that kicks off Sabbath for our family. Saturday morning, we have our taking it slow morning. Saturday afternoon is when we get outside. Saturday evening is when we have pizza and a double movie night. Then Sunday morning's church, and Sunday afternoon is our weekly prep time. Okay, that's seven. I didn't count that out very well, but hopefully as I walk through this, you'll see that it’s seven and you'll be able to follow along. So that's kind of how we break down our weekends that we are home and we are just kind of doing life.
1). Sabbath Prep
So Friday afternoon, Sabbath prep. Let's look at that first. This is a time where we try to wrap up everything from our work weeks. Any urgent emails for me. Any last minute communications that I need to write or work things that I need to wrap up, I do them Friday. A big push for us on Friday is to finish all of the kids homeschool to the point that everything is packed up back in their backpacks and ready to go to school Monday morning on Friday and we clean up and tidy the homeschool room. That doesn't always happen. I wish that it did. Sometimes we cannot finish and we have to return to it Sunday afternoon and finish them and that's okay. It happens, but ideally we love to finish on Fridays and have it all packed up in our backpacks and tidy it up and ready to go.
This is also when we do the rest of our chores for the week. So I did an episode on chores a long time ago. We have revamped our chore system since then. You know, when you have a podcast, you live and you learn and you'll put some things out there and then you'll change it. But right now, each kid has a job. My three big kids, I'll say that they have a job. Milly is in charge of cooking or baking something for our family for the week. Lyndon is our bathroom manager and Beaufort is our trash manager. So this is the time where they often will finish up their chores if they haven't done them or they'll just do them Friday afternoon. They take care of our chickens. Feed and water the chickens. Either Friday or Sunday is laundry day for my girls. They do their own laundry. I also will finish up laundry on Friday if I am able to and I'll get to that in a minute. But yeah, Friday afternoon is just… we work hard and we are getting the house tidied and everything finished up and ready as much as we possibly can before our Shabbat dinner.
One note on that: Fridays, I'm just busting it. We are working so hard. It's like the finale of our work week, okay? We're trying to finish it all. Most of the time, we don't finish. This is maybe the hardest part. When Friday dinner happens, which is our next rhythm, I really endeavor to stop any and all work. The hardest part for me is when a project that I really want done does not get done and I just have to leave it. Quite honestly, I have to look at it for the whole day on Saturday. For instance, last Saturday, I really wanted to fold all of our laundry and get it put away because I do that in the living room and there were like four laundry baskets of clean, unfolded clothes in our living room. Shabbat dinner came around and it was not folded and we had to just stop and eat and I had to wait until Sunday and I just stared at that laundry all weekend. Maybe I should move it into another room, but I think it's a good reminder that's what Sabbath is about. It's about stopping and just making yourself rest because the to-do list will never be done. So that is Friday afternoon.
2) Shabbat Dinner
Friday night we move into Shabbat dinner. We have beautiful Shabbat candlesticks and candles. My friend Laura gave them to me a long time ago. We still use them and love them and you can get them on Amazon. I will link them in the show notes. They're very simple. When we light the candles and we sit down and eat our dinner, it is typically taco night. Guacamole and queso and we have some sort of yummy dessert. It's like a feast. It's like a meal that we all love to eat together. It's a feast and it always has dessert. I shouldn't say always… Most of the time it has dessert because we just want to kick off the weekend with a very indulgent, fun meal that we enjoy together. Will will light the candles and he'll say, “Jesus said you are the light of the world” or “God said, let there be light” and light the candles and then we'll eat and we'll feast together. Then we'll play a family game or do something fun as a family together. Then we go to bed and that is when really our Sabbath kicks off at dinner.
I wanted to share with you a quote from Peter Scazzero. He wrote the book Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. Try to say that five times fast. It's a great book. It really is. It actually was the book that really introduced me to Sabbath for the first time. I read it a while ago. Anyway, this is what he says. He says,
“Sabbath, when lived, is our means as the people of God to bear witness to the way we understand life, its rhythms, its gifts, its meaning, and its ultimate purpose in God. Observing the Sabbath, we affirm God is the center and source of our lives. He is the beginning, the middle, and the end of our existence. Eugene Peterson points out, even though Sabbath has been one of the most abused and distorted practices of the Christian life, we cannot do without it. He says ‘Sabbath is not primarily about us or how it benefits us. It is about God and how God forms us.’ I don't see any way out of it. If we are going to live appropriately in creation, we must keep the Sabbath.”
I love those words. They are strong, bold, beautiful words about how we were created to order our lives around God. and that is what the Sabbath is for. He goes on to share in his book, the four principles of honoring Sabbath. Number one is to stop. Number two is to rest. Number three is to delight, and number four is to contemplate. So I wanted to pause and share those things because I'm going to explain kind of what our Sabbath looks like. If you've heard me talk about Sabbath before, you've probably heard this, but I'm not going to go into super detail. I'm going to kind of, again, divide it into rhythms or blocks, how we view our day.
3) Slow Saturday Morning
So first rhythm was Sabbath prep Friday afternoon. Second rhythm was our Sabbath dinner Friday night, which welcomes in Sabbath. Three rhythms (so rhythms three, four, and five) are on Saturday. Saturday morning is our time to take it slow. That is when we rest and we contemplate. So I'll kind of break that down for you. We rest because we sleep in. Our kids know that it's their day to watch TV and so they wake up and they come downstairs and they turn on the TV and they watch a movie or show. Usually these days it's Dude Perfect or a movie that we've recently watched as a family. They get snacks and just kind of veg out on the couch together. They love it. They have so much fun. Will and I and Winnie often will head to our porch, drink coffee and journal and read the Word and talk and just look at nature and feel the breeze and listen to our wind chimes and just take a very slow morning listening to the Lord. So we get some good sleep. We rest. We're not rushing out. We have very leisurely coffee time and we contemplate. We are thinking about all the Lord is doing, what He has done. We're trying to hear His voice and spend time with Him Saturday mornings.
4) Saturday Afternoon - Get Outside
Saturday afternoon is when we delight. We get outside, we play, we go on hikes. We will do board games if it's rainy. We just have fun as a family and play. A lot of the times, the kids will do the Art for Kids Hub on YouTube and Will and I will read books, like fiction books, things that we're enjoying. It's just our time where we kind of delight in each other, in nature. I love the warmer months because we almost always go for a hike every Saturday afternoon. It's so life-giving as a family.
5) Saturday Evening - Pizza + Double Movie Night
Then Saturday night is again when we delight and rest. We'll order pizza and we'll do a double movie night. We'll start with a family movie and we'll put all the kids to bed and then Will and I will start another movie just for the two of us after everyone's asleep. Then we go to bed and we get some good sleep. So I can't not credit this amazing family who actually posted their Sabbath like outline of how they practice Sabbath every week. That is what totally changed our mindset about Sabbath. It’s the family over at The Family Teams Podcast. There's actually a lot of episodes that they've done about Sabbath, which I can link those in the show notes, but we have kind of modified and taken their example and run with it. So if this sounds familiar or if you've heard of this over the Family Teams guys, that is where we heard it from first. So anyway, those were rhythms three, four and five.
6) Church on Sunday
Rhythm six would be going to church on Sunday. We wake up, we get dressed, we go to church, we worship together as a family. Then we come home, do an easy lunch and our last and final rhythm is Sunday afternoon weekly prep work.
7) Sunday Afternoon - Weekly Prep Work
This is where we map out our week. We have a family dinner. We discuss the schedule of the week so everybody knows what to expect. You know, we pack lunches for school. We lay out our clothes. We finish up any of the chores that were left undone on Friday. We fold laundry, we put it away. We tidy the house. Sunday is a full workday for us. We wake up, we get dressed, we go to church. When we come home, I mean, it's nonstop. We are cleaning up our whole mess from Saturday. Let me just tell you, this is so funny to me. We run two loads of dishes through our dishwasher every Sunday. When we practice Sabbath, one of the hardest things that I do is I let all of the dirty dishes just pile up in the sink the whole time. We use paper plates as much as possible, but you know, there are spoons and forks and things that we need so we'll just put it all in the sink. By the time we're done, we just have two loads that need to be run on Sunday. So it's just a lot of extra work because we've relaxed and we played and we enjoyed board games and it's time on Sunday to clean all of that up and get ready for the week. That's when I go through my weekly checklist as well. Make sure that I've got everything ready to go as far as my meal plans. Yeah, just all the things that I need to do for work and play. It just gets all planned out and then we communicate about it and then we launch into our regular kind of cadence of the week Monday morning.
Okay, so those are our seven weekly rhythms that we live by. We really do live by them. When we are home and in town, we do this every weekend and it is just a wonderful cadence. It's funny because you know, I admitted we don't do it perfectly and there's always exceptions to this, right? But I would say for the most part, this is what we do. But even this last weekend, my husband turned 40 as you heard. Last week's episode was so great. We had Will on. He did his 40 for 40, 40 pieces of advice. So if you didn't listen to that, it was so great. We had a birthday party for him and it worked out for our schedules to do it on a Saturday night. Usually we do not do birthdays, like I said, on Saturdays. For whatever reason, I mean, it was a big one and we had some other plans that was just what made the most sense for us. So we were asking the kids to do chores and get the house tidy before his birthday. It was like languishing. Like, “You don't let us do chores on Saturday!” I was like, “You're right. I don't guys. I'm so sorry, but we've got to get this house ready for guests to come over.” But I love that it's so deeply ingrained in our kids that that's kind of what they expect and they love Saturdays so much. We all love it so much as a family that we all kind of have a hard time when something throws us off a little bit and we have to change our plans.
To close out this episode. I want to acknowledge a couple things. This happens most Saturdays; not all Saturdays. In order to maintain this, we say “no” to a lot of things, but we have come to crave it and order our weeks and weekends around the Sabbath. It's so good. We are committed to fighting for this even as the kids get older through their teen years. I know it's going to look different, but we're still committed. I honestly think that because we've done this with our kids at such a young age, I think and hope and pray that they will really want to stay close to home and be part of Sabbath every weekend, even as they get older.
Anyway, that's it. Okay guys, you know I have the Work and Play Cornerstore. It's where I share something that I'm loving like a book I'm loving or a thing I'm loving. I just want to share two things today. First of all, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Peter Scazzaro is really a wonderful book about being an emotionally healthy Christian and how to do that and Sabbath is a big part of it. So go to nancyray.com/cornerstore, and you'll be able to go straight to my Amazon affiliate store and you can see everything I've ever recommended there or the things I'm recommending this week.
The second thing I want to recommend is this amazing magnetic whiteboard and wet erase markers that I keep on my refrigerator. It is the most amazing communication tool for my family. We have our meal plan at the bottom and our to-dos at the top. My friend Casey over at Anchored Women is the one who told me about this. She's amazing and she's so organized and I saw it and was like I need that in my life and I love it. I update it every day. It communicates the to-do list on Friday when we have all the chores to do. I just say “Go read the whiteboard” and they get to check it off as they do it so I don't have to keep repeating myself. Then I can just at a glance know what's on the menu for the week as well. It's great. Highly recommend it. I'm going to leave specific links to those in the show notes, but you can also just always go to my Amazon affiliate store.
Alright, thanks for listening to episode 293 of Work and Play with Nancy Ray. Everything I've mentioned today can be found in the show notes at nancyray.com/podcast/293 and you can find me at nancyray.com or follow me at @NancyRay on Instagram.
Super exciting things coming up guys. I've got a new website launching soon. I've got my new private podcast that is all about your Rhythms Reset and you can get on the waitlist for that at nancyray.com/reset if you want to. What I've talked about today is part of it, but it's a small part of it because the rhythms that we make in our life, you have to create rhythms that are daily, that are weekly, just like the ones we talked about today. I have found that I think the best way to kind of look at how to organize your life and the things that you want to accomplish and do in life is looking at it every 90 days. So the Rhythms Reset is going to be a short podcast series that will focus on how to organize your life in these 12-week chunks. Instead of looking at yearly goals or annual goals, we're going to set them three months at a time. Then you're going to set weekly and daily rhythms that are very life-giving, like so life-giving to the point that you just get excited to do life. Like I get so excited to look forward to every single Saturday. Truly it is so life-giving and I have daily rhythms in my life that are also so life-giving. So if you want to learn more about how to do that for yourself go to nancery.com/reset. You'll get on the wait list and it is launching so soon. I'm so excited!
Alright, I'm going to close with words from Peter Scazzero who said,
“Sabbath provides for us, now an additional rhythm for an entire reorientation of our lives around the living God. On Sabbath, we imitate God by stopping our work and resting.”
Thanks for listening and I'll catch you next time.
