I Finally Tried a Sabbath. Here’s What Actually Happened.

I wasn’t expecting twenty-four hours to reveal quite so much about me.

People kept telling me that keeping a Sabbath would change my life.

I couldn’t see how.

As someone who spent most of his life believing that a day off was simply a chance to catch up on everything I hadn’t managed to do during the other six, the idea that deliberately setting twenty-four hours aside for God could somehow transform me sounded suspiciously like one of those life-changing habits the internet falls in love with every few months. Buy this planner. Wake up at 5 a.m. Put butter in your coffee and apparently you’ll emerge six weeks later speaking fluent French and running a Fortune 500 company

Even after becoming a Christian, I still couldn’t quite work out why God seemed to make such a big deal out of it. Then enough people whose opinions I genuinely respected kept saying the same thing.

Sabbath changes you.

I’ll admit there was probably a selfish motive mixed in with the curiosity. If everyone else seemed to be discovering a kind of peace I couldn’t quite grasp, I wanted to know what I was missing. As I began reading what Scripture actually says about Sabbath, it became obvious that this wasn’t God’s version of an internet wellness trend, but rather an intention to deliberately give a day back to the One who gave us all the others.

So I stopped reading about it and decided to get involved - which for something that mainly involved stopping doing things, feels like a slightly odd phrase now I type it.

Going into the weekend, I thought social media would be the hardest thing to give up. Surprisingly, it wasn’t. My bigger concern was the practical uses of my phone itself. Jack is still recovering from chemotherapy and there is always that background awareness that something could happen where I am needed. My children contact me through it. My family contact me through it. Life, these days has sneakily evolved to assume you’re carrying a smartphone every waking minute.

I even disappeared down the inevitable rabbit hole of researching dumb phones as a compromise. For a glorious half an hour, I was convinced I’d solved the problem, right up until I remembered that almost nobody actually calls anyone anymore. Everything happens through WhatsApp, apps and digital wallets. The simple life was already turning out to be surprisingly complicated.

In the end, I bought a dumb phone anyway, reasoning to myself that if there really was an emergency, someone would actually call me.

The strange thing was…

Almost nothing turned out to be an emergency.

Removing myself from the constant stream of messages exposed something I hadn’t expected. Most of what demands our immediate attention isn’t actually urgent at all. It’s just convenient.

The habit I struggled with most wasn’t messaging, though. It was refreshing my Amazon book sales. I must have reached for my phone half a dozen times purely out of instinct. Go on. Just have a quick look. As though my refreshing the page might somehow persuade another person to buy the book. Eventually, after the first few urges had come and gone, something shifted. It actually became quite liberating not knowing. Whatever the numbers were at that precise moment, they would still be there tomorrow. Amazon, rather surprisingly, seemed perfectly capable of counting without my supervision.

Once I’d stopped automatically reaching for my phone, I began noticing just how many tiny moments of my day it had quietly occupied. Waiting for the kettle. Drinking a coffee. Standing in a queue. Sitting beside my wife while she’s watching EastEnders, whilst quietly wondering how a tiny square in London with about thirty residents has somehow managed to host a murder, a hit-and-run, a pub fight and a cancer diagnosis in what appears to be the same afternoon.

Every little pause in life came with an almost unconscious urge to fill it - and when I didn’t, I felt oddly empty. It wasn’t unpleasant exactly. Just unfamiliar. Almost as though I’d removed something that had been constantly humming away in the background without me ever really noticing it.

That’s when I found myself reaching for a beautifully illustrated Psalms book I’d bought. Every psalm sits over photographs of the Irish countryside and I’d deliberately placed it on display as part of my little Sabbath space. Again and again, whenever that strange emptiness appeared, I found myself picking it up.

It left me wondering what my life would look like if, every time I felt that little internal pull towards distraction, my first instinct became reaching for God’s Word.

I am nowhere near being that person.

In fact, my first Sabbath probably proved how far I still have to go.

But perhaps noticing the habit is where changing it begins.

One thing that did catch me off guard was my family’s reaction. They questioned the whole idea far more than I expected and I realised I didn’t have a proper explanation ready to confidently fire at them. After fumbling around for a bit, I eventually landed on something very simple.

“I’m trying to focus on God for a day… and on you.”

The more I’ve reflected on it since, the more I think that probably was sort of the right explanation.

My children aren’t Christians, and I pray constantly that one day they will know Jesus for themselves. Whether my first Sabbath sparked any curiosity in them, I honestly don’t know. I hope it did. Sometimes living differently says more than explaining differently ever could.

Of course, real life (especially 2026 real life) has a habit of refusing to fit neatly inside our nice little spiritual experiments. Halfway through the weekend, I suddenly realised my fishing licence and a couple of payment methods were trapped inside the very smartphone I’d ceremonially put away for 24 hours. For a brief moment, I found myself wondering whether opening the box would somehow meant I’d failed.

Thankfully common sense intervened before legalism did.

I took the phone out, got what I needed, put it straight back and carried on. Simple.

That tiny episode probably taught me more than I’d expected. Sabbath isn’t an exam where God waits behind a hedge with a clipboard, hoping to catch you out on a technicality and deduct points. I am pretty sure the heart behind it matters far more than the mechanics.

The following day, I took Jack fishing, exactly as we’d already planned to. His immune system is still recovering from chemotherapy, so somewhere quiet by the water remains one of the safest ways for us to spend time together.

Nothing about the fishing itself changed. The line drifted in the water as fishing lines always do, occasionally keeping things interesting by getting tangled in a tree. The fish remained gloriously indifferent to my spiritual development.

What changed was me. For once, I wasn’t mentally somewhere else, wondering whether somebody had bought my book, planning my next article or checking whether the world had survived the previous fifteen minutes without me.

I was simply sitting beside my son.

Church on Sunday morning felt much the same as it always does, which, now I think about it, is probably exactly the point. Ever since becoming a Christian I’ve loved the way church shuts out the noise of the rest of life and quietly redirects my attention towards God.

What struck me afterwards was that, over the previous twenty-four hours, I’d been trying to carry that same posture into ordinary life. Into making coffee. Conversations. Fishing. Sitting Quietly. Into all the unremarkable moments that usually disappear beneath whatever happens to be demanding my attention next.

When 8:30 arrived on Sunday evening, I blew out the frankincense stick that had been burning throughout the Sabbath and just sat there for a while looking at the little display I’d put together.

The biggest surprise wasn’t that I’d had some overwhelming spiritual experience.

It was that I didn’t feel relieved it was over.

People told me Sabbath would change my life.

After one attempt, I don’t think I’d go that far.

My problems didn’t disappear. Jack is still recovering. Work was still waiting. My inbox hadn’t mysteriously repented.

But something did change.

For twenty-four hours I stopped trying to live tomorrow while checking yesterday and worrying about what everyone else was doing today.

I became more aware of God.

More present with my family.

More attentive to the life that was already happening in front of me.

Will I keep doing it?

Without hesitation.

Because if this was only the first Sabbath, I have a feeling I’ve only just begun to discover what it’s really for.