A Sabbath Summer, Part 1: Anticipating Rest
What if Sabbath isn’t just a day on your calendar—but a mindset you carry with you into every part of your life?
In the first bite-sized episode of our 3-part summer series, Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen invite us to anticipate rest and play, not just plan for it. They explore how Sabbath can be more than a scheduled pause—it can be a rhythm woven into your days, your relationships, even a quiet afternoon on the porch.
Can you give yourself permission to imagine delight this summer—without immediately turning it into a to-do list? And how do we hold space for the parts of us that know disappointment, that fear the desire might not be fulfilled? This episode is an invitation to lean into your summer not with pragmatism, but with anticipation—allowing hope, imagination, and Sabbath delight to shape what’s possible.
Whether you’re planning a vacation, navigating a full house, or just trying to find 30 minutes of quiet—we hope this 3-part series will encourage you to pause, reflect, and imagine a new way of being present.
Episode Transcript:
Dan: I know it’s summer. I know it is a time for play and honor and delight, and we’re going to talk about Sabbath, but I have to start about my morning. Are you ready?
Rachael: Yeah, let’s hear it. This is a safe space.
Dan: Are you okay with me kvetching?
Rachael: Yeah, let’s do it. Okay.
Dan: First kvetch,
Rachael: Like wha…I don’t even know what that word means, but I’m here for it. Let’s go.
Dan: It’s Yiddish. It means beyond the word complaint. Nonetheless. So we begin almost every morning with what we’re going to talk about as Sabbath, and that is Becky and I take this 45 minute walk where we open the door to the day, ponder what’s ahead, pray, talk, anticipate, and anticipation is one of the most important things you do on behalf of your summer. Then get into it. Whatever the day holds, play, get into it. And then at some point, and this is what we do toward the end of the day, is to reflect, come back over the day and ponder. Well, this day began, we anticipated some really sweet things happening. Well, for both of us separately, details. Do they ever just bite your butt?
Rachael: Yes.
Dan: Well, okay, so I’m not going to go into all the details, but I had to call the airlines that took forever and it was just confusing that I had to help Becky with a computer issue and it went pretty well. But we were both frustrated with one another, and then there were three or four other things that had to be done. And already I’m out of my day. I’m not playing. It’s not part of the anticipation, and I’m just pissed. And finally, after a while, I just thought, I’m going to get another cup of coffee. It’s almost like I don’t know what else to do, but I’m going to soothe something in me by ramping myself up with caffeine. Anyway, I went into the house and Becky’s had the same morning in a different way, and we looked at both one another and it was just without words. We just came to each other and held each other and it was like she looked at me and she said, you need coffee, don’t you? I’m like, yes. And do you? She’s like, not really, but I need something in my hand. Let’s go outside and just see if we can begin the day again. It was so gracious of her to name it and for us to move. So when we’re talking about summer and Sabbath, the day unfolded to a point where our anticipation and secondly our engagement did not go well. We needed to stop the day and ponder what is going on to be able to talk about it, to be able to pray. So we’re going to talk about these three elements, a little briefer than we normally do because it’s summer. We want you not to be listening to us, but actually going to do what we’re suggesting. But alright, kvetching done. Do you relate to that? Is that…
Rachael: Okay, I have a toddler. So yes, if you remember the season of toddlerhood, it’s like every hour is broken up with details or disruptions or fragmentation or having to adjust and be flexible with plans. And even as you were talking and thinking about Sabbath and the work we’ve done thinking about summer, it’s like for those of us in the US, no matter what stage of life you’re at, our rhythms in this late stage capitalism don’t necessarily set us up well for summer gets to be a time of play. Now, in some ways it can, and I think we work hard to intention that, but what I hear you bringing is I want to just take a step back and say, yeah, for many of us, especially those with kids, summer is you have to keep working, but your kids are out of school, so they need different structure. So, so much of the preparation and anticipation is making sure they’re set up well to have summer camps or activities or our 15-year-old has his first job this summer as a lifeguard. So I think about European countries, they take four to six weeks off from work to be with their kids out of school rhythms. That’s a different kind of preparing and anticipating than in some ways knowing that you’re stepping into kind of preparation and anticipation that you should actually anticipate a lot of demand, a lot of negotiating new schedules and new rhythms. But it doesn’t mean that we don’t get to lean into a kind of resistance to set aside an intention, a different kind of rhythm, a different kind of play, a different kind of presence and a different kind of intentionality if you can intention intentionality, which I think you can, I don’t know.
Dan: I’ve never thought of it that way, but yeah, I mean, let’s intend to intend. But the task is, can you allow yourself to prepare by anticipating, not just prepare what you’re describing, which is crucial. You’ve got many more details. You’re managing between your three children than what Becky and I are preparing with regard to our day, let alone for our summer. But the key here is preparation requires something even prior to that. And that is anticipation. And anticipation is the setting free of desire in and through imagination. Can you anticipate something that you’re going to be doing this day, this week, this month, this or some point of this summer that opens the door to Sabbath. Sabbath being where you are captured by delight. And it brings you to a point of being able to say, I am in awe. I am so grateful. In other words, worship, delight that leads to worship is how we would talk about the nature of Sabbath. And so Sabbath can certainly happen on a day, a week or a portion of a day a week, but it also is a way of thinking about Becky and I took a bit of Sabbath in the middle of our day because we were in a spiral that, that 30 minutes cup of coffee sitting on the porch, praying, talking, laughing, and getting back into what we were actually anticipating for this day. So when we talk about anticipation and imagination, I’m curious as to what that first response in you is with regard to your own summer, let alone whatever day you hold today.
Rachael: I love this question because I think it is so connected to the circumstances of your life, the circumstances of the season of life that you’re in, your locatedness. How are you connected to community, what are your needs? So Michael and I, when we approached this conversation a few months ago, right, to begin to… because you have to, especially when you’re a blended family, you have to actually plan out the summer months ahead because you’re sharing time and space and planning different vacation schedules and work schedules and all the things. So in the middle of spring we had this conversation, like what? I said, what do you imagine and hope for the summer? And my husband who’s trying to finish a PhD in the past couple summers last year, one of our hopes for the summer was to make it to a Phillies game once a month. And we really intentioned that and set it aside and budgeted for it and picked the teams we wanted to see play. And it was really fun. And his initial response was, my imagination goal for the summer is to finish my PhD. And that didn’t mean, okay, so we don’t get to Sabbath. What it did mean is that in order for us to Sabbath well with some of the, and we don’t have childcare until the fall, so for our toddler and we’re both working. And so there was this sense of almost like, okay, if this isn’t a summer of a lot of travel or a lot of small trips, what are the ways then we are going to have a different rhythm. We’re going to stay more in Philly. We’re going to tend, really intention space to get good focused labor done. Then what kind of imagination do we get to have about the play and rest that will sustain us in this season? Also, we’re trying to be very frugal with our finances, which is again, there’s something really beautiful about intentioning that and then getting to imagine even within those limitations, and I think for some of us, we can get caught up in envy. Here’s an example. A lot of my siblings this summer are going on a big European vacation, and my mom was pondering this with me, I think in some ways wrestling with some of her own envy. And she was like, how are you feeling about this? And my initial response was like, I have zero envy because of the season of life I’m in. The thought of planning a European vacation right now sounds awful. I’m like, if I had the money to pay someone to do all the details, to manage all the details and they could plan a trip that would be fun for a toddler, then I would be down a toddler who by the way loves to be carried. My initial response was, no, this is not our season where that actually, that imagination doesn’t sound playful, doesn’t sound life giving. And so there was something about accepting some of our limitations of this season that actually felt liberating to imagine new. So our plan for the summer involves a lot of carving out space in the midst of our kind of ordinary rhythms that feel almost what you just talked about, something that going to the swimming pool that we go to, but having a rhythm of that that we can anticipate and it’s built in playing some around this city that we live in and doing some of those things out of the ordinary that disrupt our nor rhythms getting to the beach. We are going to try to get to some Phillies games because we live in South Philly, and that’s actually manageable for us, but also really fun. And this is one of the first summers we’ve had in a while where our imagination and picture of Sabbath actually looks more like rooting deeper into our place, into the smallness and located ness of our neighborhood. And I’m actually really looking forward to dreaming and looking outside of the box in the place we are. So that’s how our Es
Dan: In anticipation. It’s always an engagement with hope. And I love Gabriel Marcel’s very simple definition of hope, and that is, it’s a memory of the future. So for me, we’ve got some really fun travel, but the memory of the future is last summer I got to watch two of my grandchildren Gus and Elsa catch their first trout.
Rachael: That’s right. That’s right.
Dan: And it was a hard, hard process because it was a bad weather summer in Montana with rivers closed, and it could be that again, but the memory of watching them catch their first trout, when I think about what my summer holds with imagination, it is the anticipation of watching them catch their next trout. So all of a sudden the question then becomes, well where? Because if you’re going to engage in activity like catching a trout, it doesn’t happen outside of my home on Bainbridge Island, but then it’s not just where, but when and then how the playground of, well, I know a number of rivers in the west. What river do I want to take them to? And now I’ve got to negotiate with their parents. Can I have your kid for a couple days to travel to get to a river? You want to come? So all that, the details of actually making it happen can easily take away Oh, no, no, no, no. Anticipate. Let the hope, imagine. Again, I can see both of them right now as I’m talking. I can see how they hold the rod, I can see where I want them to cast. Am I letting myself dream into desire and allowing that to shape the eventual planning, programming of what I want to occur? I think what mostly I failed to do is what I just put words to. I’m a pragmatist with regard to a lot of details and a lot of dreaming. So to be able to sit back and allow the river to have sound, to think about where I’m going to be standing when they cast… all the, shall we say, the freedom to play in imagination is the kind of anticipation I’m very aware I don’t allow myself often to do, but just doing this podcast as we’re talking about, well, how do we engage a summer? How do we engage the particularities of what we do? And then as naming that, naming it with Becky, she’s like, we don’t do that together. I’m like, I don’t do it myself, let alone with you. She’s like, well, what if we were to begin to sort of narrate a form of fiction. A kind of what we can anticipate when we go through, we have our 55th high school reunion this summer. I’m ancient of days. And she’s like, well, why don’t we do that? And I’m like, I don’t want to do that. Well, why not? I don’t know. It would take a lot of time. Well, is that really the issue? And it’s kind of the issue. And I said, I’ve done that with regard to taking these kids fishing. And she’s like, well, do you really anticipate this trip? And I’m like, oh my gosh, no, I’m doing it because you want to go. And I’m going primarily because I don’t want her to engage the three boyfriends that…
Rachael: 55 years later still locking that down.
Dan: Yeah, yeah. You never know. You just never know. I believe we are deeply committed to one another, but why take… I put a seatbelt on when I drive? That’s, this is…
Rachael: No, I felt that in my bones. I was like, oh, yeah, I feel that way.
Dan: So back to the point, oh my gosh, the very exercise itself exposed how little of the summer. I’m really looking forward to it, but it’s good. So we started laying out five or six things we’re doing this summer and then asking the question, can we play together in imagination? What are we anticipating? What are we looking forward to in that moment? And it’s really helpful as a source of discernment of that, well, if I’m going to a reunion and I’m doing so just because of my own form of jealousy, that’s kind of belittling
Rachael: There could be more for you.
Dan: Well, but that’s the point. What can I allow myself to begin to dream with regard to that form of activity? So again, my question to you is, do you imagine, do you let yourself, in one sense dream the particularities of what you’re hoping for going to a Phillies game? I’ll just admit it, the Mariners would be our version. That’s a taste of hell.
Rachael: I’m sorry.
Dan: So it would not be, and I’m sure other people going fishing, that would be my taste of hell. So we’re making no judgment. But do you think about getting a beer and a hot dog and where you’re sitting and watching? I mean, how much of the imagination do you play at?
Rachael: I do, very much so. I mean, even to the point of where we’ll park, because I have become that person, and I don’t remember which, maybe it’s like State Farm, it’s some insurance commercial where they have all these approaching middle aged people who are becoming their parents, and they’re like, we can’t protect you from becoming your parents, but we can… And I am the person who’s the most probable way of getting out of the parking lot at the end of the game is if we park in this corner. But that’s the kind of level of anticipation.
Dan: Yeah. Now what I’m saying though is that’s pragmatism.
Rachael: I know.. I’m saying no, yes, of course I do. I mean, I think in some ways to anticipate, for me as someone who, I’m a big dreamer and I actually take a lot of delight in the little things. So the ritual of going to a baseball game, we stop at Federal donuts and we get donuts and a chicken sandwich to eat before the game. And then in the third inning, baseball, MLB goes a lot faster now, they changed the rules last year, so you actually have to change your plan. But yeah, we got to get hot dogs, we got to get some dipping dots, ice cream or some frozen yogurt. And you used to have a lot more time to do that, but now you have to be a little more stealth. But I think planning with the anticipated disruption of let’s say rain or a toddler who you think will love this activity, who ends up hating the activity, and then you have to kind of try something else. It does bring up the parts of myself that have known disappointment or have known desire thwarted, right? And again, I’m talking about really ordinary things that someone could be like, well, I mean, yeah, okay, affiliates game gets rained out. What’s the big deal? You can just go again. And it’s like, yeah, of course, but also maybe you won’t get to, and maybe you’ll get really frustrated that this dream, this thing you plan that you thought everyone would enjoy isn’t as enjoyable to everyone, and then therefore it’s not enjoyable to you at all. So I feel like I’m constantly in anticipation risk management. I’m not someone who hopes. I think sometimes the ways we manage hope is like, okay, well I will expect the worst that way if anything above the worst happens, then I can be like, well, this was great. I’m definitely someone who’s like, no, I want this, and I can suffer the disappointment and kind of wrestle and be angry. So yeah, I think anticipation does bring up both desire, but also mitigating, how do I mitigate disappointment.
Dan: Right here is I think the key of what we want people to ponder. And that is if you truly dream at one level what Sabbath holds, the sweetness of delight being caught by wonder, awe, so deep a gratitude, you open yourself up to loss at a deeper level. You open yourself up to disappointment. And that’s in part why it was hard for me, not just with regard to the reunion, but even with regard to going fishing. We were so disappointed last season that almost all the rivers in Yellowstone, which is a big trip, even though we live west, to take our families to go, it was brutal to be hunting for small streams to just get our kids into one fish. When I began to imagine, I was at war with, it didn’t work out that well. And yet, back to this point, the sweetness of those moments, I mean, it wasn’t like more than a moment or two of their joy in catching a fish. I can remember where we were. I can remember the tone, the voice, our shouting. Becky was nearby. My daughter-in-law was nearby. We were shouting. Joy. That’s what I want for you, for me, for us, with regard to Sabbath. Will you let at least a portion of this summer be held with keen anticipation, not pragmatism, what are you going to do, but anticipation of ation, what would be the Sabbath, the light of something working in a way in which it’s even beyond perhaps the language of imagination, but in allowing that, yeah, we come to a second portion of the Sabbath summer category, and that is how do we deal with reality as it begins to come. So we’ll pick that up in our next conversation.