And the angel said “Do not be afraid Mary, you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to his son and you are to give him the name Jesus.”
So for us as a family, there’s no question that rest is maybe the most important thing we do all week. My name is Eric Sztanyo from Keller Williams Realty and team Sztanyo.com, where we are helping you find your home and strengthen your family. I wanted to do something a little bit different. We’re not gonna talk about real estate as much today. We’re gonna talk about strengthening your family and I haven’t done many videos like this. Some of you guys may have seen the video I did where I shared my story of how I got into real estate. Which was about five years ago now. And tell’s a little bit about my testimony as well, and kind of my journey of faith. And I wanted to talk today a little bit about this idea of family and our tagline for the channel is find your home, strengthen your family.
Well, why do I have that? Well, A- I have five kids. It’s easy to brand the five, right? And, I love working with families as I was thinking through kind of like my favorite clients. Not that if you’re single or don’t have kids, I don’t like working with you because I do. But, but it was easy for me to relate with other people that have similar experiences. So, you know, I thought through kind of like my first couple years, the clients that really enjoyed helping them find their home were the ones who were really thinking deeply about the space and how it mattered for their family, what they wanted to train into their children, who kind of had a vision for the house as more than just like, you know, a place they live and that they really like, which is important too. But there’s, you know, things like hospitality or land or whatever. How they want to use the house. Hosting others, maybe having an in-law stay with them, guest rooms. Things like that.
Why Rest is Important for Yourself and Your Family
But today I wanted to talk about this idea of rest. Strengthen your family with rest. What does that mean? I’m gonna do a little story time. If this this video’s not for you guys feel free to bounce off, I get it. But I wanted to try something a little different. And particularly in this series, I wanted to start with this idea of rest and Sabbath or Shabbat as it might be called. And what it’s meant to us. I said in the opening of this video, it’s the cornerstone of my family’s week. It is the most important day – hands down. It definitely wasn’t always like that.
And so if I were to go back in time and tell a little story. I was probably 23, 24 years old. I was already married to Whitney. And I went to a training of a friend of mine. The title of the training was like “The rhythms of God”, something like that, which was a very strange and bizarre picture in my mind, I was thinking of God dancing or like, I don’t know, I didn’t know what it meant. But it was more closely aligned with if like “The calendar of God” or “The time blocking of God. It was more about, you know, the rhythms of a day there.
We can find these biblically in Genesis 1, there was evening and morning the first day when God created light out of the darkness. We see the rhythm of the week that God worked for six days and he rested on the seventh. Which we’re gonna talk about more in this video. And then there’s also, you know, there’s rhythms of the month and lunar calendars. There’s rhythms of the year with the seasons. And so the idea of the training was how do you get more in step with these rhythms that are baked into creation? And again, if you don’t believe in God, I get it. That’s okay. If you know my story, I’m a Christian. So I’m coming from a biblical point of view and I just wanna share how it shaped my life. You can take it or leave it.
The kind of the end of the story was or that training, maybe the first step was you should probably start with implementing a day of rest, a Sabbath day of rest. That’s maybe the most practical place to start when you’re trying to dig into the rhythms of God. And so my wife and I, no kids yet. We said, okay, let’s go for it. Let’s try to implement a Sabbath. At that time. We were newly married. We were both young life leaders. We both had other jobs. If you know anything about young life, we were basically volunteer youth ministers for like 30 to 35 hours that we week on top of our jobs.
And I think she was actually still finishing up college too. So she had college jobs and was volunteering at this ministry like 35 hours a week. It was kind of a crazy schedule. We didn’t have kids yet. We were almost still living like a single person’s schedule when we were newly married, which I would not recommend. But it was good. And the idea of implementing a day of rest was super challenging. We’re like, what do you do? We work really hard and we had grown up as kids in America who were like, you go to school five days a week and then you have the weekends to play. Now we were just in kind of a different season where we were volunteering a lot of our time.
So a day of rest was very, very, very difficult for us to implement. We’re like, what do you do? Do you just like, sit there? What is rest? What is not rest? Are we obligated to do this? Are we like sitting if we’re not doing this? And I could certainly can answer all those questions. But I just wanna hit three things that we’ve discovered over the years, as we’ve learned to implement this. And as it’s become kind of the most important thing of our week.
Number one is that rest is a gift from God. I know for myself and a lot of people who grew up in the church, it’s easy to think of rules as things you have to do. When I think of Sabbath now, I think of something that I get to do. The reason I say it’s a gift is when Jesus was being asked about Sabbath, he said, you don’t understand. Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. And every week, that’s kind of how we look at it. It’s like this gift from God that we get to open up and say, thank you. In Genesis it says six days, he worked on the seventh, he rested and we are created in his image. Therefore we’re in alignment with him. When we rest on the seventh day. Now the counterpoint to that is you gotta work six days. And we typically work for the weekends, it is certainly a thing in America.
And so for us personally, we try to rest from Friday evening. We have a meal to kick it off through Saturday evening, basically or late afternoon. And then from Saturday night and even all day, Sunday is actually one of our busiest days. Like we work really hard on that day. We work six days and we rest on the seventh. But that’s point number one. Sabbath is actually a gift for man.
Point number two is that rest takes faith. You actually have to trust. This is something we oftentimes we say at our meal, when we kick it off or we have guests that we invite into this meal. We have these little things of like, why do we do Sabbaths? And one of them is we believe that God can do more in six days than what we can do in seven.
And it’s hard if you’ve never implemented this before, and you are like tight on cash, it’s hard to rest. It’s hard to slow yourself down. It actually takes faith. And, I think one of the reasons God put this in our week is because if there’s anything he wants from us in our life- I was actually at a men’s group last night. And we were talking about our purpose in life. And one of the ideas shared was like – I believe our purpose is to actually live a life of faith that trust God and the Sabbath, a day of rest actually gives you a weekly opportunity to practice and to work out this faith muscle in your life, where you stop and practically what I try to make that look like in my life is I don’t answer phone calls. I don’t answer emails. I try not to do any of the real estate work or my normal work things. And instead I relax and rest. It’s a faith muscle-I think, that you get to build up like if you guys know the story of the Israelites, when they were in the desert and God provided food for them with manna on the sixth day, he told them to take a double portion of manna and on the seventh day, it wasn’t there. And I just think this is part of the week that he wants us to constantly remember “Trust me, trust me, trust me.” And so on the Sabbath, if you implement that into your week, that’s one of the things you get to do, which is practice trusting. So that’s number two. So number one, rest is a gift. Number two rest takes faith.
Number three, the day is blessed. Referring back to Genesis, but God actually says, “God blessed that day.” If you believe in the Bible, which I do it, it is a real thing that the day is actually blessed and you can enter into that blessing. So for us, what we do with my family, what we do with my kids. We kind of have a few ceremonious things that we do each week. One of the things that we do when we sit down for that dinner is we try to do two things every week. We try to remember, and we try to proclaim. If you know, Andrew Peterson, he’s got a great song about that. Actually, we have a musical playlist that we play every week. Cause we’re forgetful people. We can get into these weird cycles of forgetting and we need to be reminded of the story.
So we have musical playlist. We have a scented candle that we light every week. And I tell the story every week my kids are around the table and I say, In the beginning, God created the heavens in the earth. And the earth was formless in void and darkness was over the surface of the deep and my kids turn off the lights. They’re like darkness! And we sit in darkness around the dinner table. And then I say, and God said, let there be light. And my wife lights a match. And all the kids are looking at this candle. And we remember the story that, and we retell the story that we were in darkness. And then Jesus came into the world and there was a light.
So each week in our day of this blessing, we get to remember that story. And then we just do really fun things. We usually have a really good meal on Friday night. I usually make pancakes on Saturday morning. And it’s like a big pancakey fun, you know, deal where mom gets to rest a little bit, cuz she’s been working her butt all week and dad does some of the cakes. And then we do our favorite things on Saturday on our rest day, we go hiking or we go, you know, to a park or whatever the thing is that you love to do. I would recommend put that on your day of rest. Maybe it’s reading a book, maybe it’s not doing anything. Maybe it’s just lying down. Maybe it’s taking a nap.
All of these are very, very good things to try to shut down the normal work that you might do through the week and enter into this day. That is blessed.
Know More on How To Strengthen Your Family with Team Sztanyo
If you are interested in more of these kind of like dad hacks, I’ve been a part of like family ideas and fatherhood groups for a long time now. And I love talking about this stuff. It’s a real passion of mine in terms of strengthening your family. So we do a lot on this channel about finding your home.
We haven’t done as much around to strengthen your family. If you like this please give it a thumbs up, leave a comment below if you like it. What are some of the things you do to strengthen your family? What other topics do you want to maybe chat about? Maybe we’ll put these on a different day of the week or something like that. And if you do a Sabbath already, what are some of the, the family hacks that you guys do on your Sabbath that make it great?
Hope you have a great day and thank you so much for watching! Subscribe to join team Sztanyo. And again, the reason we’re doing this is we believe that home is where families grow strong together. It deep belief of ours. And so I love helping people negotiate and do all the things real estate wise, but I also love seeing a family find the right spot, where you can grow roots and strengthen your family.