Wrestling with the Sabbath

Summary

For the first thirty-five years of my adult life, I did not take a twenty-four hour Sabbath every week. I almost never took any Sabbath of any kind, ever. I, a minister of the gospel for a quarter of a century, ignored the Sabbath.
I had lots of excuses. I was a graduate student who had so many books to read and so many papers to write that I needed all seven days of the week to finish my work. In one early job, my Christian employer explicitly denied my request for a regular, weekly Sabbath, which often meant we worked seven days a week. He was the boss, so I had to do what he said. Later Jenny and I owned a house built in 1914 which needed repairs and improvements whenever I wasn’t working at the church. Or I was a bi-vocational and later a tri-vocational pastor who had way more work than I could ever hope to accomplish in six days. And anyway, the Sabbath was only about rest, so why did I need to rest during the day when I slept well at night?