Sabbath: The Liberatory Practice I Never Knew I Needed

By Dr. Samara Susan Ryce

When I was a kid, I hated Sabbath.

I was raised Seventh-day Adventist, and Sabbath—from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown—was a day where everything stopped. And by everything, I mean everything.

No TV.

No secular music.

No games.

No opening of Christmas gifts until sunset if Christmas happened to fall on a Saturday.

No birthday parties, field trips, or school dances if they landed on a Friday night. While my classmates were skating under disco lights or attending football games, I was home, obeying.

To me, Sabbath was about restriction, not rest. It felt like punishment masked as holiness.

However, that changed—slowly—when I attended Oakwood University, a Historically Black College or University (HBCU) and Seventh-day Adventist institution in Huntsville, Alabama. Not because the rules were different. They weren't. But because for the first time, I tasted Sabbath as something that could be nourishing. On Friday evenings, we'd sing in harmony at AY (vespers service), rest without guilt, and find joy in simply being. On Saturday mornings, we'd get ready for church while blasting Fred Hammond or Kirk Franklin, singing along and laughing until our sides hurt. Choir rehearsal with Dynamic Praise (alto section representing) where the music would fill Moran Hall and our souls. I wasn't just keeping the Sabbath; I was recovering myself in it.

Years later, no longer a practicing Seventh-Day Adventist, but a committed Christian nonetheless, and now a woman who fiercely guards her autonomy, I've begun to rethink the Sabbath again—but this time, through the lens of justice and liberation.

I've read Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey twice. I've underlined and wept through the chapter on rest in This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley. These works have helped me articulate something I've always felt in my bones: Sabbath is not just about church, and it's not just about rest. It's about refusal.

It is the refusal to be consumed. The unwillingness to grind.Refusal to surrender your body to systems that were never built for your flourishing.

In this way, Sabbath becomes less a religious rule and more a labor law—especially for those in positions of power. In Exodus, the command to rest on the seventh day isn't just for the landowner but for the servants, the animals, and the foreigners. It's a command for equity. It says: if you rest, you must also create conditions that allow others to rest too. It's not just personal—it's systemic.

And let's be honest: religion, like racism, has often worked to take our bodies away from us. It has told women—especially Black women—what we can wear, what we can do, how loud we can be, when we can speak, and who we must submit to. Like white supremacy, religion too often polices and punishes under the guise of protection.

But here's what I know now:

Sabbath is not about control. It is about freedom.

It's the freedom to turn off your phone.

To ignore the to-do list.

To be still without apology.

To center joy, pleasure, and breath.

To say no.

To stop.

Sabbath, when claimed on our terms, becomes the liberatory practice we didn't even know we were desperate for. A divine pause in a world that insists we prove our worth through exhaustion.

To my fellow single mommas, educators, freedom fighters, and soul-weary sisters: may you reclaim rest. Not because a church tells you to. But because your body, your mind, and your spirit deserve it.

May your Sabbath—whatever day, whatever shape it takes—be a declaration. A protest.A healing.A homecoming.

Because in a world that demands your endless labor, your rest is holy. And it just might be your most powerful resistance.