Spencer Howell is, by his own admission, an achiever. He loves to rest, but he loves to get things done more. So in early 2020, in the middle of gutting a foreclosed house he and his wife were remodeling, he faced a genuinely hard decision. Saturday was his workday, the one big block of hours each week when the project actually moved forward. And he was about to give it away.
On March 6, 2020, the Howell family sat down for their first Sabbath. They set the table a little fancier, not entirely sure what they were doing, and committed to stepping back from work from Friday night to Saturday night. It felt like a leap of faith, because it was.
Within a few weeks, the entire world shut down.
As the COVID pandemic destroyed every other element of normalcy in his life, the one thing Howell had just put in place was the thing that held. “It had totally been God’s provision,” he says, “to bring us into Sabbath ahead of all that.” The anchor he had been most afraid to drop turned out to be the only one still holding.
Howell shared that story on Biblical Money, the video podcast from Israel365 where Rabbi Rami Goldberg sits down with business leaders of faith to talk about work, money, and belief. What emerged was less a business interview than a testimony about the day of rest, and about a blessing that Howell, a Christian, found waiting inside a very Jewish practice.
The career he never applied for
Howell has spent his working life being pulled from one opportunity to the next, and he holds the unusual distinction of having sent out exactly one resume. He meant to go into marketing, applied for a stack of marketing jobs, and got none of them. He applied for a single finance role, was offered it, and, with his wedding a few weeks away, took it. To his surprise, he loved the work and was good at it.
A couple of years later, snowed in during a Minnesota winter with a friend who was living in his basement, a couple of whiteboards, and a couple of beers, he made the decision that would define the next eight years. They bought into a new technology and launched a company called Life Floor, which makes flooring for water parks, splash pads, and the places children play, engineered to make those spaces both safe and beautiful. They even brought the manufacturing back to the United States. Howell ran the business from 2011 until 2019, then stepped back, and today works in contract plastics manufacturing alongside his brother-in-law. He has not had to go looking for a job since that first application, and he reads the whole arc as God’s hand, one door opening onto the next.
An invitation they kept setting aside
The Sabbath did not arrive all at once. For years, Howell and his wife felt what he calls an invitation, a sense of being called into something they had not yet figured out how to accept. His wife worked for a church, and when they tried to carve out a day of rest on Sundays, ministry life swallowed it whole. It hardened into something almost legalistic, an “I guess we’ll take the afternoon off” that never really changed anything.
Then in the spring of 2020 they took a class that made a specific suggestion: try keeping the Sabbath as a family, from Friday night to Saturday night. It made obvious sense, which, Howell notes, should not have surprised anyone, given whose wisdom it was. “This has seemed to work really well for the nation of Israel for a very long time,” he reasoned. “Jewish people have been doing this for thousands of years. What’s it going to hurt to try for a couple weeks?” They jumped in.
What a Christian Shabbat looks like
Ask Howell what the day actually looks like, and the answer is disarmingly honest and often funny. It begins with what his family calls the Sabbath scramble, the rush to get the house ready before the day starts, dishes done, laundry not left in piles, the whole environment set up to be genuinely restful rather than a to-do list in waiting. Goldberg recognized it instantly. Every Jewish home in the world runs some version of the same scramble, he noted, though he teased that if you are not actually scrambling, you may not be doing it quite right.
On the food, Howell cheerfully grades his family a C+. They manage a salad or two and a meal nicer than the usual weeknight, and they are still learning. Rabbi Goldberg filled in the Jewish picture. Preparation in observant homes can begin as early as Tuesday, and the Talmud tells of the sage Shammai, who, whenever he came across a fine cut of meat, would set it aside for Shabbat, and if he later found a better one, would save that for the Sabbath instead. He always gave the day his best.
The Howell table has its own charm. There are plastic champagne flutes that look real but bounce when the little ones drop them, a dessert served every single week as the one no-questions-asked celebration, and, recently, a nicer set of dishes that arrived from Amazon in the middle of a Passover dinner they were hosting. They light candles and say the blessing, and manage challah on a good week, another line item on that C+, though Goldberg reassured him that perfectly kosher challah can be found these days even at Trader Joe’s. They do not spend money on the day, choosing to eat what they have already prepared and to enjoy, as Howell puts it, how much they have already been given. After the kids are asleep on Friday night, he and his wife keep a little time just for the two of them.
The children, it turns out, love it, so much that the family has taken to using the word as a verb. They love Sabbathing. “We get this amazing day every single week,” Howell says. “Some people only get eight of these a year.”
The blessing inside the restriction
What surprised the Howells most was arithmetic that should not have worked. They gave up their Saturday workday, the very hours they had been counting on to finish the house, and somehow got more done. They would rest, then hit it hard Saturday night and Sunday morning, and week after week they found they had accomplished more than when they used to work straight through Saturdays. Projects moved faster. Fewer trips to the hardware store. The electrical work that should have been a fight went smoothly. “It really was just like adding extra time to a week,” Howell says, and he came to read it plainly as the Lord’s provision.
Goldberg has heard this many times, and he offered the principle underneath it. People see only the restrictions of Shabbat, he said, and miss that the restrictions are exactly what make room for the blessing. He reached for an image any visitor to America will recognize. Walk into a vast department store and face forty-seven kinds of shampoo, and you freeze, paralyzed by unlimited choice. In Israel, where the options are fewer, you pick one of three and move on. More is not better. Focus is. A day fenced off from work and money and screens is not a cage. It is what lets the blessing land.
Howell has felt the same logic in his own week. Starting from a place of rest, he says, forces the decisions you would otherwise keep pushing to tomorrow, and it lets him plan the days ahead with a clear head. He has also grown to love the smaller freedoms of the day, none more than the permission to ignore his phone for twenty-four hours.
His whole story is, in a sense, a Jewish gift being unwrapped by a Christian family, which is precisely the argument at the heart of Shabbat Revolution: A Practical Guide to Weekly Renewal, a book by Rabbi Elie Mischel, Israel365’s Director of Education. Shabbat, Rabbi Mischel writes, was never meant for Jews alone. It is a gift held out to the whole world, a weekly renewal anyone can step into. The Howells are living proof of what happens when someone accepts the invitation, and they have begun extending it to others, teaching friends and inviting them to a Shabbat dinner to taste it for the first time.
As the conversation closed, Goldberg offered Howell a blessing that God would continue to bestow peace and success on him and his family for honoring the Sabbath and honoring their home. “I receive that,” Howell answered. “Blessings on you and Israel as well.”
The anchor he was once so afraid to drop is now the fixed point his whole week turns around. He gave up the one day he was sure he could not spare, and got back something he never saw coming: the day that makes the other six make sense.
Watch the full conversation between Rabbi Rami Goldberg and Spencer Howell at Biblical Money.
