It’s taken years for me to integrate Sabbath-keeping into my week. For most of my life, I have attended a church service on Sundays, but otherwise Sundays haven’t been distinct. In recent years, though, ceasing from work, resting, and celebrating God’s goodness on Sundays has gained importance in our family. It’s become a day when we worship with our church community, eat a midday meal, nap or read for a long portion of the afternoon, and enjoy time together in the early evening. As I’ve written elsewhere, we try to avoid purchasing things on Sundays. We also try to avoid e-mail. I’ve taken to giving our household appliances a rest. The laundry can wait. 

American culture doesn’t share my family’s appreciation for the Sabbath. I routinely pass a highway billboard from People’s Bank extolling their around-the-clock services. They boast that if there were eight days in a week, they’d be open all eight days. We live in a 24-7 era. We may only report to an office five days a week, but most people are “on” all the time, via the internet, cell phones, and retail establishments.

So my ears perked recently when I heard an interview with William Powers, author of Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age. One of Powers’s strategies for using technology wisely is what he calls “an Internet Sabbath”: “We turn off the household modem . . . We can’t do Web surfing . . . We really enter this other zone, and it’s wonderful. . . . Even when we’re connected, we can feel the benefits of having been disconnected a couple days ago.”