What do you call Sunday?

Words have meaning. Now that might seem like an obvious statement, but I believe words have an impact on how we view what we are talking about. Have you ever thought about the difference between a trip and a vacation? What about a young adult versus an adolescent? Kids or children? I think these words carry different meanings although a lot of people use them interchangeably.

So here’s a question. What do you call Sunday?

Some people group it with Saturday and call it “the weekend”. There really isn’t any difference in their mind between the two days. It is just a time period when you don’t have to go to work and you do other things around the house like sleeping in and yard work.

Other people call Sunday “The Lord’s Day”. For a long time, this was primarily how I thought about Sunday. People who use this term usually see it as a day to be devoted to things related to the Lord. This means Sunday School, morning service, choir practice, evening service, and socializing with people from church after the evening service.

Other people use the terms “The Sabbath” or “Day of Rest”. The past several years this has been more my thinking. (I’ve written briefly about this before and Kat wrote a thoughtful comment after my post.) I’ve thought a lot about how God created for six days and then rested, giving us a pattern for rest.

As my husband and I have made the change from thinking of Sunday as “The Lord’s Day” to “The Sabbath”, we’ve found it challenging at times. Both of us were used to Sunday being full of church activities and it seemed “right” to us. To only attend the morning service and spend the rest of the day in “restful” activities was a challenge at first. But the longer we practiced having a weekly Sabbath, the more we realized we were much more prepared to start the rest of the week than we were when Sunday was full of just as much activity (or more) as the rest of the week.

So what do you call Sunday? My intention here is to raise the question, not necessarily convince people that one term is correct and the others are wrong. If you visit my blog often enough you’ll find that I am good at raising questions, but don’t necessarily want to provide "the answer" to every question I raise! But hopefully this is some good food for thought and maybe a discussion at the dinner table.