Once when I was driving down a Kentucky road with a double yellow line, a woman tailed me and then flew past me.  I did what you should never do: I confronted the woman, “Do you know I have a car seat back here?”

“It’s a free country!” was her defense.

I hear this defense for carrying high-capacity semi-automatic rifles, for spewing hatred on social media, for justifying all manner of consumerism, dehumanization, and oppression.

It’s a free country.

Rarely do these people look free to me.

Freedom, for an historically enslaved people known as the Hebrews, was grounded, not on being able to do whatever you wanted, to whomever you wanted, but in paying attention to the way things really worked.

If you were to read the ancient creation stories of the Hebrews, you would begin to notice how the way they speak of God forming the world is meant to shape a people in freedom.  In the creation story, God is spoken of as bringing order to the world in six days.  On the seventh day, He rests.  No working.  No creating.  The Hebrew word there means “to cease”.

So from the Giver’s perspective, there is work and then there is rest.

And in this account, humanity is said to have been created on the sixth day.  So that the first day of the week for humanity is not work, is not planning, is not proving, is not earning.  The first day of the week for humanity—God’s seventh day—is rest: ceasing, waiting, listening…being.  In the Hebrew creation story, we are human beings first, human doings second.

From our perspective, there is rest, and then there is work.

Our first “work” is to receive the six days of gift that the One has been busy preparing for us, to pay attention to the breath of life in our lungs, to see and appreciate the people in our lives.

We were—we are!—meant to begin our week in the grace that everything else is founded upon, this grace that is older than dirt.

And this is not only true for the rhythm of a week.  This primordial grace is meant to shape each and every day.  Here is how the ancient Hebrew account speaks of a day, “The land produced vegetation…and God saw that it was good.  And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.”  It isn’t just the third day that is spoken of in this way.  Each day is spoken of the same way: evening…and then morning.

Can you see what is going on here?  In a culture that didn’t have electricity, or lights, or iPads, or Red Bull to prop them up at night, the evening was that part of the day when you stopped your work or put away your distractions and simply rested with those around you.  When the sun went down, everything slowed down.  You went from human doing, back to human being.

And the ancient Hebrews set their days accordingly.

So that…you began each day doing nothing, being unproductive, “wasting” your time.  When you woke up in the morning, half the day was gone.  Work followed rest.  And the first work was to open the gifts that the Giver had already been at work that day preparing.

The ancient creation account was meant to teach us how to live in the rhythm of grace, how to live in the land of the free.

Can you see how profound this would have been for a people whose identity for hundreds of years were as slaves?  Who were only worth what they could produce?  Who were only as valuable as their previous day’s productivity?  Who only counted if they could bear children?

Can you imagine living like that?  Can you imagine living in a world that only valued what you could do, how successful you were today, whether or not you were having or raising children, whether or not they were as successful or busy as you?  Can you imagine living in a culture that devalued you if you became too old to work, or if you couldn’t keep your output up, or that looked down on you if you didn’t work or look at your phone 24/7 like everybody else?

Thank God we live in the U.S. of A., where people keep telling me that we’re free.