--- url: 'https://www.freedomchurch.je/learning-to-taste-the-grapes-again-rediscovering-delight/' title: 'Learning to Taste the Grapes Again: Rediscovering Delight' author: name: freedomjersey url: 'https://www.freedomchurch.je/author/freedomjersey/' date: '2026-04-19T15:17:06+01:00' modified: '2026-04-19T15:40:08+01:00' type: post categories: - Uncategorised published: true --- # Learning to Taste the Grapes Again: Rediscovering Delight When was the last time you did something simply because it brought you joy? Not because it was productive, not because it needed doing, but purely because it delighted you? For most of us, that’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Life has a way of becoming one long to-do list. Tick one thing off and two more appear underneath it. Weekends become catch-up time. Rest gets squeezed out. And even when we do stop, it’s often just long enough to recover before we start all over again. We live in a world that runs on productivity and efficiency, and somewhere along the way, many of us have forgotten how to delight. How to play. How to slow down and enjoy this extraordinary life we’ve been given. ## Delight Deficient There’s a growing sense that many of us have become what you might call **delight deficient**. We know how to work. We know how to be busy. We know how to get things done. But do we even know what we enjoy anymore? Life can become so full of responsibility and pressure that we default to productivity. We can end up living like we’re still slaves — always needing to produce more, always needing to perform — when actually we were made for something richer and fuller than that. The ancient practice of Sabbath — setting aside one day in seven to stop, rest, and delight — is one of the most countercultural things a person can do in today’s world. It’s not complicated. But it does cost us something we hold on to very tightly: our time. ## The Cost of Sabbath Many spiritual practices can be woven into an already busy life. You can pray on the move. You can be generous without rearranging your schedule. You can serve and fit it around everything else. But Sabbath asks something different. It asks you to give up an entire day — to let go of control, to trust that your life doesn’t entirely depend on you, and to believe that things won’t fall apart if you stop for a while. That can feel uncomfortable. Even risky. Because we live in a culture that says if you want something to succeed, you need to keep pushing and producing. There’s a well-known story about the owners of The Entertainer toy shops — a Christian couple who made the bold decision not to open their stores on Sundays, even at Christmas, even when every other retailer was trading. From a business perspective, that looked like a gamble. But the business thrived and became one of the leading independent toy retailers in the UK. The point isn’t that keeping Sabbath guarantees everything will go perfectly. It won’t. But it is a profound act of trust — a way of saying: *my worth isn’t measured by how much I produce. You are God. I am not.* ## The Gift of Play One of the ways Sabbath restores joy is through something we tend to undervalue as adults: **play**. Children do it naturally. They can spend hours doing something for no reason other than it brings them joy. They know how to wonder. How to laugh. How to be silly. As adults, we can lose that — buried under layers of responsibility and expectation. Psychiatrist and play researcher Stuart Brown puts it plainly: play is not a luxury — it’s a biological necessity. We were made for it. Our Creator made us this way. But delight takes time. You cannot rush joy. You can’t produce it on demand. No one sprints through an art gallery — you meander slowly, you sit, you take it in. If we want to enjoy something, we have to give it time. Yet we inhabit a world in which everything is fast. And hurry and joy are not good friends. ## Restoring the Soil Tim Keller once said that because the world is full of ugliness, we need Sabbath to fill our souls with beauty. All week long we live in a world of noise, pressure, bad news, and demands. If we never stop, our souls become tired, dull, and joyless. Think of it like soil. If you keep planting and harvesting without ever letting the ground rest, eventually the nutrients run out and nothing grows. The same thing can happen in us. But when we keep Sabbath, something restorative happens. What’s been depleted gets replenished. Joy returns. Life comes back. There’s a powerful moment in the Old Testament book of Nehemiah. The people of Israel have just returned from years of exile — years of struggle, pressure, and just trying to survive. When they finally gather and hear God’s word read aloud, they realise how far they’ve drifted. And they begin to weep. It’s a deeply human moment. Because sometimes, when we finally slow down and hear God again, the first thing we feel isn’t joy — it’s grief. Grief for how tired we are. Grief for how far we’ve wandered. Grief that life has become about surviving rather than living. But here’s what’s said to the people: *"Go on your way, eat the fat and drink the sweet wine… do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength."* They expected a rebuke. Instead, they got a command to **celebrate**. Eat good food. Drink something sweet. Share with others. Rejoice — because this day is holy. Holiness, it turns out, can look like a feast. Like people gathered together, eating, laughing, sharing, enjoying what they’ve been given. Life with God was always meant to be lived with joy. ## Two Vineyard Owners Imagine two people who each own a vineyard. The first walks through it every day with a clipboard. He checks the numbers, measures the yield, thinks about efficiency and profit. He works hard. He knows the vineyard inside out. But he never tastes the grapes. He never sits under the vines. He never celebrates what the vineyard produces. He lives in it, but he never delights in it. The second walks through the same vineyard slowly. He breathes in the air. He crouches down to feel the soil between his fingers. He holds the grapes carefully and notices their sweetness. He rests in the shade of the vines, invites people to share the harvest, knows the names of his workers, and celebrates what the vineyard produces. He lives in it, and he always delights in it. Which one sounds more like the life we were made for? The invitation is to live like the second owner — to stop and taste the grapes. ## Learning, Not Performing Here’s the encouraging thing: nobody has Sabbath figured out. We’re all learners. When it comes to this practice, we’re all beginners in some sense — learning how to rest, how to play, how to make time for joy. Learning to keep Sabbath can feel a bit like learning to drive. At first it’s awkward. There’s so much to think about. You stall, you get it wrong, it feels unnatural. But over time, it becomes second nature. And unlike a driving test, Sabbath isn’t something you pass or fail. It’s a practice you grow into, slowly and intentionally, week by week and year by year. It begins with deciding that this time matters. That it’s important enough to protect. Being ruthless, not just about eliminating hurry, but about **pursuing joy**. Asking honest questions: what will make this day different? What helps me slow down? What brings genuine delight to my soul? It doesn’t have to be impressive. Often it’s very ordinary things — a slow meal with people you love, a walk outside, music, laughter, reading, games, prayer without rushing. Things done simply because they bring joy. And for some of us, it might mean learning to play again. ## A Taste of the Life That’s Coming Sabbath isn’t just about the present. It’s also a rehearsal for the future. Every time we keep it, we’re enacting something — stepping out of the world as it is and tasting the life that God intends. A life of joy, beauty, and delight. As C.S. Lewis once put it: *"Joy is the serious business of heaven."* One day a week, we get a glimpse of the world as it was always meant to be — and of the world that is coming. A time of peace, restoration, and life as God intended. So here’s the question worth sitting with: what brings delight to your soul that you rarely make time for? What helps you slow down enough to taste the grapes? Delight is not a waste of time. It’s part of how life gets restored from the inside out. And Sabbath is the gift that makes space for it — one day at a time.