This is five minutes with Brooke and TJ, a midweek challenge, encouragement, or check-in that we hope produces positive change in your faith, marriage, parenthood, and daily life.

Let's get started.

A few days ago, we answered questions about Sabbath, rhythms, and rest on our story.

Many were along the lines of, I like the idea of Sabbath and rest, but fill in the blank with a schedule conflict,

a job, not an excuse, but just like a reason. A lot of reasoning of why it won't work for said

person. Right. So I've been thinking about a lot of these dilemmas and I wanted to share some

thoughts and encouragement and maybe a little bit of a challenge for you. Yeah. So.

I'm ready.

You're ready?

I'm ready.

Sabbath is a gift from God to us.

Now imagine that I bought you two plane tickets, redeemable any time to anywhere in the world. We're talking first class day fair, an amazing place to stay, probably like an Airbnb treehouse

or something cool like that.

Yeah. Unlimited sour candy for the plane ride, you know, the works. I wrap the tickets and give them to you,

but you decide you're not going to open them. So I don't know what's in there. Exactly. They sit on a shelf

somewhere collecting dust, but the fact that you don't unwrap them doesn't change the fact that they're a gift.

It's still a gift for you.

And so you just go on living your life the way you always have,

not realizing that if you unwrap this gift, something amazing would happen.

You would see something you've never seen before, experience something you've never experienced before.

You would step more firmly into the life God wants you to live. You would take one,

you would take one step, one tiny step closer to bringing heaven to earth. Sabbath is a lot like

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