My wife looked at me this past weekend and said, “You don’t really get a day off, do you?”
She wasn’t complaining. She said it plain, no edge, just true. And I didn’t argue.
I’ve been chewing on it ever since. Because I honestly can’t tell if that’s contentment or just how a man sounds after he’s stopped expecting one.
My calendar is full. Yours probably is too. And I’d bet somewhere in the last month you’ve said some version of “I’ll rest when the season’s over.”
That sentence is what I want to talk about.
The Word for It
I know what a lot of coaches do with the word Sabbath. We file it under nice idea for people with slower jobs.
We treat rest like a reward. Finish the season, then rest. Get the roster settled, then rest. Get the new hire trained, get the tournament behind us, get through the next big push, then rest.
Notice the word “then.” That word is the whole problem. If rest is the reward, it’s always one more thing away. There’s always another tournament. Always another tryout. Always somebody who needs something from you before you’re allowed to put it down.
So a coach who believes rest is a reward almost never collects.
A Word for the Teachers
Most of you reading this are coaches, which means a lot of you are teachers first. So let me say something to you directly.
Teachers get a bad rap. You’ve heard it. They only work eight to three. They get weekends, holidays, and the whole summer off. Somebody says it at a cookout, half joking, and you smile and let it go.
Here’s what you know that they don’t. The bell at three isn’t the end of the job. It’s the end of the part people can see. Then come the grading, the lesson plans, the emails, the parent you’re still thinking about, the kid you noticed wasn’t himself today and can’t stop worrying about. For a lot of us, the practice or the game comes next. The weekend is when you catch up. The summer is when you rebuild the whole thing for a new group of kids.
You aren’t coasting. You’re pouring out to a room full of other people’s children, day after day, and most of it nobody ever sees.
So if you’ve been quietly carrying that comment, hear this from one teacher to another: what you do matters, and you’re allowed to rest from it. Not because you’ve earned it by the standard of anybody’s opinion. Because the day was made for you too.
A Grainfield and a Fight
There’s a scene in Mark 2 that I’ve read a dozen times without seeing what’s actually in it.
Jesus and His disciples are walking through grainfields on the Sabbath. The disciples are hungry, so they pick a few heads of grain as they go. And the Pharisees, who’d built a fence of rules around the day, stop the whole walk to complain. Why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?
Jesus doesn’t argue the rulebook. He reminds them that David once ate when he and his men were hungry, and then He says the line that changes how you read the whole thing:
“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.” Mark 2:27-28 (ESV)
Read that slow. Made for man.
The Pharisees had turned rest into a list of ways to get it wrong. Jesus turns it back into what it always was: something built for your good. A gift with your name on it, not a rule with your name on the violation.
That’s the first half of the truth. The Sabbath isn’t a burden somebody laid on you. It was made for you.
Design, Not Decoration
The second half is easier to miss, and it’s the one I need most.
Go back to the very beginning. Genesis 2 says God finished His work, and then:
“And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.” Genesis 2:2-3 (ESV)
Rest didn’t show up after creation was already running. It’s in the blueprint. God wasn’t tired. He didn’t need the day. He built the rhythm into the world on purpose and then invited us to live inside it.
Think about it like a coach.
We would never let a fourteen-year-old throw nintey on Friday and start Saturday. We shut arms down in the offseason. We count innings. We build in the dead-arm period, and nobody calls the coach who does it soft. We call him smart, because we know what happens to an arm that never gets a break. It doesn’t get tougher. It breaks.
That’s not a suggestion in the training plan. That’s the spec.
And here’s what stopped me. I’d protect a kid’s arm to the inning and still run my own life like the spec doesn’t apply to me.
Rest Is a Person, Not Just a Pause
Here’s where I think a lot of us get rest wrong, even the ones who take it seriously.
Tim Tebow has talked about this on a podcast, and it stuck with me. His point, as I understood it, was that biblical rest isn’t just a physical break. It isn’t a vacation, or a nap, or a day of scrolling your phone on the couch. Real rest is time spent with Jesus, putting Him ahead of the noise, and trusting that God is at work even when you can’t see the plan.
And then the part that got me. He talked about working from rest instead of chasing achievement until you’re empty. Running from a place of being filled, not running to get filled.
That flips the whole thing. I’ve spent years treating rest as the thing I do so I can get back to work. Tebow’s point, and Jesus’ point in that grainfield, is that it works the other direction. You work from rest. You coach from rest. You lead from rest.
Otherwise you’re just doing the Red Dirt Tax with a nicer name.
Two Ditches
Now, there are two ways to miss this. Pastor Joby Martin has a line about staying on the road that I think about all the time: “For every mile of road there’s two miles of ditch.”
Rest has two ditches, and I’ve been in both.
The first is the Pharisees’. You take a gift and turn it into a checklist. You keep the day, but you keep it tight and joyless, and you feel proud of how well you didn’t do anything. That’s not what Jesus was defending in that grainfield.
The second ditch is the one most of us live in. You quietly decide the rhythm is optional. Nobody announces it. The calendar just fills, one reasonable yes at a time, until there isn’t a single day that isn’t spoken for.
This whole month keeps landing on the same picture. Elijah under the broom tree in 1 Kings 19, after the biggest win of his life, asking to die because he’d run himself out, and the first thing God did wasn’t a sermon. It was food and sleep. Luke 5, where the bigger the crowds got, the more often Jesus withdrew to pray. Jethro in Exodus 18, telling Moses that a man who does it all alone will wear out himself and everybody standing in line behind him.
Same thread every time. The people God uses aren’t the ones who never stop. They’re the ones who know how to.
What It Actually Looks Like at My House
Here’s the honest part. I don’t get a whole day. My wife was right about that.
Sundays are a travel ball field for me. I love it. But it means I’ve never had the tidy, twenty-four-hours-of-nothing Sabbath I just wrote about. So I’ve had to ask a different question: what do I actually do with the pockets I do have?
Here’s my real answer.
Most mornings, during my warm-up sets, I read the devotion. Before the day gets hold of me, I’m giving the first few minutes to Jesus. It’s not long, but it’s how I get my head and heart fired up the right way.
After dinner, my wife and I take a walk with the pups. Every day. Nobody’s phone matters on that walk.
In the fall, we watch Georgia games together, and I don’t think there’s anything better. Some nights I keep the puppy downstairs so she can have quiet and a book upstairs. Some nights we’re both in the basement watching a movie. Some nights I’m playing video games while she reads next to me, and neither of us says much, and it’s exactly right.
On Sundays when we don’t have a game, I serve on the security team at church. I’m grateful for it. I get to stand at the doors between our littles and anything that might want to hurt them. Not because we’re facing life and death on a normal Sunday, but because a steady presence at those doors helps keep them safe. That’s a good place for a man like me to stand.
But I’ll be honest with you. Standing at a gate is still giving. It fills me in its own way, and it’s still not the same as sitting down and letting God serve me. So I’ve had to learn to let a Sunday be both.
None of this is a Sabbath in the strict sense. I’m not going to pretend it is. But it’s the same instinct: stop being the answer, and just be with the people God gave me. And when a real open day does show up, we find each other in it. We always have.
I also think about what the ProMind couples report said about the two of us. It said men wired like me tend to give until we’re worn out, and then get quietly resentful, and that the person next to us may not notice how much we’re carrying. And the sentence it said I most need to hear from my wife? “What do you need? I really want to know.”
Read that one twice. The guy who answers “fantastic” every time needs someone who asks twice, and needs to be honest when she does. Rest isn’t just something God gives me. Sometimes it’s something my wife hands me, if I’ll let her.
If the pockets are all you’ve got right now, take them seriously. But hear me: I’m not telling you it’s a substitute. I’m telling you it’s a start.
The Whole Chain
Step back and look at the month.
We started with a player. A kid who can hit a fastball but comes apart after he fails in front of everybody. A kid whose attitude was really the last symptom of a tank that ran dry days earlier. A kid on the bleachers an hour early because home is a hole a program has to help fill. All month, the answer was the same: show up for the rep he’s on, and pay attention to the life behind it.
Then we looked at the coach doing the filling. The one who gets cast as the villain because he never narrated the plan. The one who develops his assistants on purpose instead of gripping every decision himself. The one who answers “fantastic” every single time because he’s never stopped to run the gut-check.
And that leads here. Player is fed by coach. Coach is fed by faith. Rest is where that last link gets its refill.
If you skip it, nothing announces the break. You just get a little less present with the kid on the bleachers. A little shorter with your assistant. A little more “fantastic” and a little less true. Everybody down the chain pays for a tank you never let God fill.
On September 2 I put a picture at the top of this series: a coach handing pieces of himself to a player, dissolving as he did it. Then I gave you the verse I’ve come back to all month, spoken by Jesus to tired people, with no conditions attached:
“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Matthew 11:28 (ESV)
Not earn rest. Not schedule rest after the season. I will give you rest.
You can’t give what you never receive. That’s still the truest thing I know about coaching.
This Week
Do one thing, and make it concrete.
Find your pockets. Not the day you wish you had, the real ones. The morning window, the walk after dinner, the game night, the quiet hour on the porch. Pick one and give it a name. Don’t call it “free time.” Call it the thing it is, and protect it like a game.
Then give it to God first. Even five minutes. Read something short before the day gets a vote.
And ask the person closest to you one honest question: “What do you need?” Then let them ask it back, and answer without saying “fantastic.”
If a real open day shows up on your calendar this month, take it. Put the phone down. Stay off the lineup and the group chat. Let the program run on what you’ve already poured into it, which is the honest test of whether the pouring-in took.
When something pulls at you, remember the sentence from that grainfield. The day was made for you. You’re not breaking a rule when you rest. You’re finally living inside the design.
One more thing. October is coming, and we’re going to start asking a harder question: which scoreboard are you chasing? The coach who rests is the only one with a shot at answering it honestly.
Greater Together
Leave a Reply