A Sabbath Summer, Part 2: Play, Disappointment, and Daring to Hope

Last week, we talked about dreaming—giving ourselves permission to hope for delight and rest this summer. But what happens when those dreams meet reality?

In Part 2 of the Sabbath Summer series, Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen explore the tension between desire and disappointment—the beautiful and the broken that live side by side in us, in others, and in the world. Because Sabbath isn’t just about dreaming and planning. It’s about participating. Living into the play.

But here’s the truth: Things rarely go exactly as we imagined. Disappointment is often inevitable. And delight—true delight—often comes not in spite of brokenness, but within it.

This episode is a deep invitation to stay in the story even when plans unravel. Dan and Rachael reflect on the paradox of Sabbath as a commandment that calls us not just to rest, but to remember what we’re fighting for: connection, restoration, joy, and relationship—with ourselves, each other, and with God.

Sabbath isn’t an escape from the world’s urgency—it’s a radical act of resistance and reconstruction within it.

As you listen, consider: How might you make space this summer not just for fun, but for redemptive play—play that embraces imperfection, disappointment, and still dares to hope?

*This episode contains some explicit language. Listener discretion is advised.

Listener Resources:

• Read Sabbath by Dr. Dan B. Allender and Phyllis Tickle. Rachael Clinton Chen was a research assistant on this book, published back in 2010!
• Also check out Defiant Joy by Stasi Eldredge.

Episode Transcript:

Dan: Sabbath requires engaging what we talked about before, dreaming, anticipating. But then once you have planned, once you have created a structure by which you enter into a summer activity. Then you got to live. You’ve got to live. And I want to begin with a phrase that seems to come from our military, I think, if I’ve heard it as a kind of statement from the Marines: “Embrace the suck”. Heard that before?

Rachael: No.

Dan: Well, what does the phrase mean to you as we step into the category of participation in the play of reality?

Rachael: It kind of feels similar to radical acceptance.

Dan: I think that’s probably a more biblical sounding… “Embrace the suck” does not sound highly biblical, but very effective as a language tool to engage. Nothing works out as you planned, as you prayed, as you in one sense dreamt. And that isn’t totally true. I mean, I’ve had some things that I’ve dreamt that have turned out even more sweet than I could have created, but I think it does require an engagement with summer plans, Sabbath orientation, that things often bear this intersection between desire and disappointment.

Rachael: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to me it’s the inevitability of being human in a world that can be incredibly beautiful and incredibly broken, and being people that are incredibly beautiful and incredibly broken. And the thing about Sabbath is that it’s not something we do in isolation or solitude. So it always involves relationship and invitation to play in relationship. And it’s hard enough to step ourselves into play, let alone try to do that with other people. And I was thinking about this conversation even because a part of me that’s like, well, it’s also hard to do it when it feels like everything around you is burning down. Maybe you need to stay hypervigilant. Maybe you need to stay… How could you possibly step into play and delight and all these things when there’s so much crisis and so much urgency, maybe even within your own body or your own relationships. And I thinking about our work on the Sabbath book and thinking about Sabbath as a commandment and actually being the fourth commandment that kind of transitions between the love of God and the love of neighbor and thinking about the people of Israel following this commandment, even in the wilderness or just that sense of there’s something we’re being invited to about leaning into the play of God that feels so counterintuitive, paradoxical, and even counterproductive, right? At times. What is this possibly accomplishing toward our mission, toward justice, toward restoration of all things. And I think in some ways that’s part of why we have to step into this reality of play. Because in some ways, if we don’t remember what it is we’re meant for what we’re fighting for, what we’re moving to restore, we don’t give our bodies a taste of that. If we can’t push against disappointment or I guess as you’re saying, embrace it as a part of the process, as a part of play. We don’t actually get to see what can be co-created in the midst of it, and not just with others, not just with ourselves, but with God.

Dan: Well, it’s prompting a memory. I’ll check with you to see if you share it. I had this sweet privilege of writing the book on Sabbath, working with you and Philip Ellis.

Rachael: That’s right.

Dan: And the two of you were sitting on a couch in my office, and I think it was you, but again, that’s why I’m checking. At some point you got animated as you sometimes do.

Rachael: Shocking. Shocker.

Dan: And remember, you just sort of leaned forward, and papers were kind of, do you remember you used to bring a trillion?

Rachael: Yeah. I had seven piles.

Dan: Articles. Papers. Always had that sense of like, oh my gosh, pure, unadulterated, but beautiful chaos is coming into my office. Not that it was pristine by any means, but nonetheless. And you at one point lean forward and said its about radical defiance.

Rachael: I do not remember that, but I’m not surprised.

Dan: And I remember thinking this actually changes so much of the nature of my understanding of Sabbath and the embracing the suck, owning radical surrender. All that’s true, but it doesn’t quite get to the notion of that defiance of we know nothing will likely work out. If you have dreamt well about what you anticipate with regard to this taste of delight and honor and awe and worship in the context of whatever you do in that summer moment probably won’t work out, do we then give up hope? Lesson hope? Does disappointment become what obscures the nature of our desire? And I think that notion of what we come to in Sabbath is in and of itself a radical defiance of what seems to be reality by bringing into play a sense that there’s another reality always intersecting, always in some sense bumping into the mirror material world as we see it. But it is the work of the unseen world at play. And do we have a sense of that? It will not erase the frustration of missing the literal boat because your flights were delayed, your heart’s going to be broken. If that’s been your dream of a cruise and you didn’t make it, but how will you in that, again, embrace the suck? Yeah, but far more have radical defiance that somehow even within disappointment, there’s an opportunity for, I think the word I want to use is reconstruction. You get to reconstruct a dream within a dream. Of course, I can’t help but say from The Princess Bride, “mawaige, a dream within a dream.”

Rachael: We just watched that with our kids. They were like, what is this?

Dan: You need a certain sophistication to be able, which again, your teenagers may have or may eventually have. But as a classic film that does describe, yeah, you need to have a dream within the dream. And that dream reconstruction has to have a defiance in order to escape to disappointment, leading to resentment. Versus, okay, things are not working. How can we engage, not just make it a little bit better, but find in this something that bears a radical reconstruction of a new dream?

Rachael: Man, I wish I was part of me wants to be like, yes. And here’s all my examples of what that has looked like. And actually, I am struggling to remember details, but I am remembering the feeling of letting the disappointment be present when a dream of a different kind of play is being disrupted, being dismantled, as some might say, being deconstructed in real time because of circumstances or maybe because you have to pivot to join someone in their suffering or, yeah. I mean, the most simple examples that come to mind is in the midst of COVID, we were trying to plan outings with our kids that disrupted the monotony and the terror and kind of the anxiety. And most of the time they were like preteens, and we were pulling them away from screens and at getting out of the house, and in some ways not anticipating this anxiety they would feel entering out into the world that it felt more vulnerable in their little bodies and they would have the most biggest resistance. And I remember those being really pivotal times for me because I didn’t quite have the capacity, I was needing a different kind of rhythm, a different kind of freedom, a different kind of play. And I didn’t have a capacity in those moments to escape resentment, as you say. I just went right into why are you so self-centered and not wanting to embrace this beautiful opportunity for us to do something different? We just want to go home. And I was not able, in some ways, I think part of the reconstruction is actually having the capacity to see what’s going on underneath the surface. Whether it’s, okay, so how do we renegotiate our dream here with a disrupted plan? How do we even allow grief to move us into new imagination? Right? Because for so many of us, disappointment isn’t storied, it’s embodied. And for many of us, it might be what we anticipate more than goodness.

Dan: Yes. Oh, I think goes, let’s say it again. I think we often, as you said in the last program, we in one sense work from the worst case scenario, and then if things are a little bit better than that, it’s like, great, that’s great. We’re asking for a counterintuitive move, and that is dream. Last summer, we had great plans that got disrupted because Becky’s best friend was dying, and we knew that we had to cancel plans that we had been dreaming and anticipating, and then make a trip back to Columbus, Ohio where we’re both from, to be with her friend Julie. In the context of that, I mean, we are doing something that is right. It is, I mean, inconceivable not to be there, but how do you when you’ve lost certain dreams, and then you go into a heartbreaking where you go, how do you anticipate the time with Julie? That’s beyond my pay grade imagination. It was right to do, but it was a war watching a dear friend die. But as we began to do that work of reconstruction, it’s like, what are we going to do in the time we’re there? You can’t be in this room 24 hours a day. There have to be… you got to give her a break. Got to give Becky a break, et cetera. And Becky went, I want to walk around Jeni’s ice cream. Have you ever had Jeni’s ice cream?

Rachael: No.

Dan: Oh my gosh. There is joy ahead for you, but… I don’t know if it’s in Philly, but it actually began Jeni’s ice cream in Columbus, Ohio, actually a place called Grandview, Ohio. And it’s where I was born with my biological father, my mom. We lived in Grandview for a short period. It’s also where Jeni’s ice cream, and I’ll just say there’s a lot of good ice creams. This is in the top five in the universe. It’s good, very good. But it holds more memory because it was one of the few places that Becky and I could take my mother, particularly when she was suffering the beginnings of her dementia, that she could have joy. And so it was good ice cream, but also a memory that held goodness. And she was like, I need to walk around, because her father had lived in Grandview. So she’s like, I want to walk by your house. I want to walk by my dad’s house. And both were within a mile and a half of Jeni’s original, the first Jenny ‘sice cream came in that place. And I’m like, yeah, we can do this. We’ve created already a plan that would, this would never have been on our agenda. And to say a stroll, an ice cream became better than the plans that we had. No, but it became something where there was something holy, defiant, but also really, and again, a little bit of a pun to say, that was really sweet to have added calories, but also memory being forged into that interplay of creating goodness.

Rachael: And I think that that’s a kind of play that we don’t often imagine when we think about what play means. I think so often our sense of play involves more escapism or yeah. What does it mean to imagine play that persists in the midst of suffering or play that gets co-created in the midst of dreams deferred? Right? And for me, I can just say that is still a place of growth because there’s such well worn neural pathways that have helped me mitigate disappointment. Right. Okay. Let me just turn to dissociation or let me, yeah, okay. We can’t do that. So you know what? Let’s fine. Let’s just all pick something that is kind of more self-soothing, oriented and actually doesn’t allow us to be present with each other in the way we were hoping for, or let’s all just, let me just give into the rage and then we can just sabotage this whole thing where we don’t even want to be around each other, and therefore we feel better about not being with each other. And so there’s something really beautiful about your and Becky’s capacity in this moment to choose something that is far from escape of grief. It’s a return to memory that has a lot of honor, but also the playfulness of Jeni’s ice cream in the midst of it. And I’m sure stories of just how you found each other being so close and yet so far away for such a season and finding each other. And so I think that’s a really poignant memory to bring.

Dan: And it in part was, shall we say, sponsored? I’m not sponsoring. I would love if the owner of Jeni’s, Jeni heard the podcast and said, I think I’ll send him a free pint. Oh, so there’s no sponsorship here. But the sponsorship came in large measure because we were reflecting on our dear friend Stasi Eldredge’s book, Defiant Joy. It’s like, oh, here’s that word again, defiant joy. I’m not going to deny, I am experiencing loss and heartache. And every hour we spent in that hotel room, not hotel, the hospital room, it was just, again, just even thinking about it, I can feel that just desire to put my head on the table and weep, and it’s not yet. And there was something as we departed, because where this hospital was in the area, and Ohio State University wasn’t a far drive for us to get to that spot, and it felt defiant. We are going to live in a way in which even though death is present, and in this case I’m not using metaphor, the disappointment of not having rivers open so that my grandchildren can fish the rivers we had planned to fish. Yeah, it’s a kind of death, but well, we’re talking about a death. And then to be able to say, what in the name of God is Paul talking about in 1 Corinthians 15 when he says, oh, death, where’s your sting? Where’s your victory death? Because when you’re looking at the particularity of the surface of reality as we live, it sucks. And to have that defiance coming along Pascal and going, I’m going to make a big gamble, and here’s the gamble. The resurrection is true and death, you son of a bitch, you don’t get the final word. You narcissist, you consuming predatory, malignant narcissist. You don’t get the final word. You don’t get it in politics. You don’t get it in familial interactions. You don’t get it with a loss of dreams, even if it’s a very small dream like the Phillies might win. And to hold that in that sense of, no, you can’t pretend everything is well, but my guess is in most occasions, there is something comparable to memory being lived out with the anticipation of joy in the moment. And whether that’s Jeni’s ice cream for you, or I can’t remember now, the donut place, you stop on the way to a Phillies game. It doesn’t have to be calorie sugar or starch, but it does have to have a taste of goodness. And that’s what true play I think holds. We get to play in the realm that doesn’t win. And so how do we say now in the reconstruction, we will find something where we can laugh or at least say, and we’ve had stories, again, I’ll not take you into the particulars, but disasters. Disasters. And at one point, I remember Becky, that this was in Germany with regard to just horrible events happening where she just said, well, I don’t see any good, but this will be a good story one day. And you go, well, that’s a long way off. But indeed defiant joy is how we’re meant to play. There’s a third thing that we want to put words to, and that is if you begin to dream, anticipate, if begin to play and participate, there has to be in Sabbath, a time in which you reflect, ponder, and in one sense, make use of what has occurred for what will one day occur. We’ll jump into that next time.

Rachael: Sounds good.