Rest, family, and Returning to God’s Design

How Scott & Amanda Cumbee Traded the Chaos of the Modern Church for the Sacred Stillness of Shabbat — and Found a God They Never Knew They Had

It's a Friday afternoon in rural North Carolina, and while most of the country is rushing toward the weekend, picking up dry cleaning, stuck in traffic, scrolling through noise, the Cumbee family is already slowing down.

The phones are quieting. The cooking has begun. Candles are being lit. Scott Cumbee will take his wife Amanda's hand after the sun sets, and he will speak a blessing over her. She will speak one over him. Then they will move to their children, to their son Samuel, to their daughter Faith, to their youngest, little Rachel Grace, and they will call goodness and provision and purpose over each of them, one by one, by name.

This is Shabbat. The Sabbath. Friday evening through Saturday evening, every week, without exception. And for the Cumbees, it is not a religious obligation so much as the heartbeat of everything they do.

“It's a gift," Scott says, leaning forward with the kind of certainty that only comes from having once believed something very different. “It's a gift that Yeshua gives to His future bride. He's saying, stop with all the chaos and enjoy your meal with me."

The Voice That Changed Everything

Scott and Amanda Cumbee didn't arrive at this place easily or quickly. Both were raised in Baptist homes. Both grew up in the church. Scott came to faith at age eight. He'll tell you his mother brought him to church before he was born, that he was, as he puts it, “birthed into church." Amanda too. And for most of their adult lives, they did what faithful Christians do: they preached, they served, they gave, they poured themselves out.

Scott was the kind of minister who ran hot with conviction. Revivals moved through his services. Signs and wonders accompanied his preaching. The Holy Spirit was, by any measure, present. He describes himself in those years with an almost comic certainty: “My philosophy was, if there was a refrigerator in heaven, my picture's on it. If there's a billfold in His back pocket, my picture's in it. He knows me, and I thought I knew Him a whole bunch."

He was, he'll freely admit now, quite wrong.

The moment of reckoning came at a desk, of all places. Scott had been given an extraordinary opportunity: Trinity Broadcasting Network reached out to say they would publish anything he wrote. He sat down to pray about what to do with that gift. He thought about writing on the Holy Spirit. It seemed the obvious choice. The Holy Spirit had been the engine of everything.

And then, cutting through everything, came a voice.

You don't know me.

Scott stood up. Walked around. Came back to the desk. The voice said it again.

You do not know me.

“I walked out of the office, went inside the house, and told Amanda," he recalls. “‘Amanda,' I said, ‘Father just told me I don't know Him.'" Amanda's response was immediate, and, she admits, a little terrifying." I said, ‘Well if you don't know Him, Lord help us all, because none of us knows Him then.'" She laughs at the memory, but the laughter carries the weight of how seriously she meant it. Scott was the leader of their home. If the man who preached and prayed and studied had just been told he was missing the relationship, where did that leave the rest of them?

It left them at the beginning. Which, it turns out, is exactly where Father wanted them.

The Stranger in the Parking Lot

Before the great revelation fully arrived, there were smaller ones, encounters that seemed to be preparing the Cumbees, softening the ground of their understanding.

There was the man on the interstate. Father told Scott to give him twenty dollars as he walked by on the shoulder of Interstate 40. Scott got out, called after the man, who wouldn't stop until Scott said “The Lord," and then he stopped, turned around, and reached out to take the money. When Scott walked back to the truck and turned around, the man was gone. Completely. “Under Interstate 40," Scott says, shaking his head. “Nowhere to be seen."

And then there was the drive-through. Scott and Amanda were headed to a crusade where they would be giving thousands of dollars in a charitable gift that evening. They stopped at a Taco Bell, and a man approached asking for help. They scraped together the modest cash Amanda had in her purse, whatever she had, not much, and gave it to him. The man was grateful but almost otherworldly about it. He told them there was a family broken down nearby who needed the help more. When they pulled through the drive-through and came back around to look for him, he had vanished. They circled the parking lot. Nothing.

Amanda still remembers what Father spoke to Scott in that moment: You're willing to give away large amounts of money tonight, but are you willing to help somebody in need right now?

“That's really where everything started coming from,” Scott says. “We were living that lifestyle, we love helping people. And Father's like, ‘I want you to know me deeper.’”

The Ancient Paths

The deeper knowing, it turned out, meant going backward. Or what felt like backward, until they realized it was actually forward, back to something that had always been there, waiting.

“Father showed me a basketball one time," Scott says, “and said, This is a basketball. This is the beginning. Go back to it." He's talking about Torah, the first five books, the instructions, the foundational covenant that most Western Christians have been taught, explicitly or implicitly, to regard as obsolete. Fulfilled and therefore finished. Grace having replaced law.

The Cumbees came to see it differently.

They point to a verse buried in the book of Jeremiah, where the weeping prophet records the voice of God pleading with his wandering people: Why don't you go back to the ancient paths? “Father's pleading for his children to come back to him," Amanda says. “He's saying, ‘Go back to the basics, you forgot, go back.' It's the same thing today."

This is the Hebrew Roots tradition, a movement of Christians who seek to recover the Hebrew context of the New Testament, to observe the biblical feasts and Sabbath that Jesus himself kept, and to read the Scripture through what they call a Hebraic rather than Greek mindset. It is a journey that has surprised and occasionally troubled the more conventional churches they came from.

Scott tells of the day he stood in a pulpit and said, essentially, that the traditions of men had made the Word of no effect, and the congregation that had just proclaimed the Bible to be the most powerful thing on earth did not find this particularly welcome. He tells of a church official who offered to pay him more than anyone else if he would return to being a “Baptist preacher," a man who went from irritated to tearful when Scott told him, plainly, that he had sold out when he was eight years old and wasn't available for purchase.

“I didn't last much longer at that church," Scott says, without apparent regret.

What Friday Sunset Means

The centerpiece of the Cumbee family's practice, the thing that has most visibly reorganized their week, their home, their identity, is the Sabbath.

It begins at sunset on Friday and ends at sunset on Saturday. During those hours, the world's noise stops. There is no rushing, no working, no keeping up with the chaos that the rest of their neighbors are buried in. There is food, prepared ahead. There is family. There is the blessing.

Scott describes the blessing with a tenderness that is striking in a man who clearly carries considerable strength. He takes Amanda's hand and speaks over her. She takes his and speaks over him. He moves to each child. He prays not only for who they are but for who they will become — for his son, that he will be a man who leads a family toward the Savior; for his daughters, that God is already preparing husbands for them who will love and protect them even more fully than their father does.

“It's almost like doing your vows all over again," he says.

The Shabbat table, Amanda adds, has its own rules. “We don't talk about nobody at this table. This table is made to talk about Father, our love, how we love each other. It's to build up." She references the science of water and spoken words — the idea that what we say over the things we consume, over the people around us, has measurable effect. “We're made of water also," she says. “Make sure everything you speak is going to uplift, edify, to build up."

On Saturday, when the rest of the world is wide awake and moving, the Cumbees walk their property. They drive their UTV around the pond. They thank God for the land, speak protection over it, declare it set apart for kingdom purposes. They rest. They study. Their daughter Faith reads them chapters from her novel in progress, pacing the narrative with instinctive craft. Rachel Grace, the baby, smiles when the music comes on.

“Just enjoy nature," Scott says. “My goodness. What He's created for you. It changes everything."

Ministers from around the world have called him, he says, burned out and hollowed. He asks them one question: are you honoring the Sabbath?

The answer is almost always Sunday morning services.

“Sabbath," he'll say quietly. And then: “Count on your calendar. Sunday's the first. Saturday's the seventh." The silence that follows, he says, is always long.

The Book on the Shelf

The book was a vision before it was a manuscript.

Scott describes sitting in what seemed like an airport, it may have been a dream, it may have been something else, and seeing a book on a shelf, blurry, unreachable. Then came the image of a large red bow, the kind you'd put on a new car. He connected them. The gift. The bow. The Shabbat.

The Gift of Shabbat grew out of a few pages of notes Amanda had compiled for friends who kept asking what they were doing differently, why the family seemed to have found something. “We can do better than this," Scott told her, and they did, over considerable protest, with several additional chapters added against Amanda's wishes and what both describe as a very long editorial process.

“I told Scott many times, we're not adding another chapter," Amanda says, laughing. “And Scott's like, ‘Amanda, we got to.' And I'm like, ‘Scott, I've already done it.’ And he'd say, ‘I don't like this part. I got to redo this.'"

The finished book is a practical guide to Shabbat observance for families coming to it fresh, structured with examples for how to prepare for the day, blessings to speak, and the Hebrew context for what each element means. The Cumbees are careful to note that it's not prescriptive. You don't need to follow it precisely. You don't need to have it all figured out. You need bread. You need a cup. You need to sit down with the people you love and acknowledge that this day belongs to God.

“All it takes is Friday at sunset, cut it off," Scott says. “Saturday at sunset, say the blessing. Father, I thank you, I honor your Sabbath. Take some bread, take a cup, put some juice in it. And just remember."

The Guitar and the Gun

There is a quieter story threaded through the Cumbee family's spiritual journey, one that Scott shares reluctantly, only because he says Father asks him to.

He grew up in a hard house. His father was a man who had, by his own account, been called to ministry and ran from it. He was also a man who, in dark moments, threatened Scott's mother. Scott remembers lying in bed as a child, hearing his father holler, hearing the click of a rifle, hearing the threats his mother endured. He learned early how to pray. He learned early how to fast. He learned to lie in the dark and cry out to God because it was the only thing that made things stop.

Years later, in one of those long exchanges he has with Father in the small hours of the night, he was told to trade some of the rifles he owned for two Taylor guitars he'd been admiring. He pushed back. The rifles were worth more than the guitars. It didn't make financial sense.

But one of those rifles, he realized, a lever-action, was actually the gun his father had used to terrorize his mother.

And Father spoke.

The same gun that the enemy used to haunt you when you were little caused you to cry out to me. The same gun that brought pain to you will be the same gun that brings music to you.

“Every time I sit there and look at those things," Scott says, looking at the Taylors hanging behind him on the wall, “He says, ‘Scott, I was the one that prevented that trigger from getting pulled. But I am the same one that allows your fingers to play your pain.'"

He pauses. “So when you hear a song, sometimes it comes through pain. Sometimes the pain that you think was meant to destroy you was truly given to you so that the world can see — only through him — is why I'm here."

He is not a man who dwells in self-pity. He has already moved on, already talking about teaching his son to play so that one day his son's music will cover the heart of a woman who will sit beside him. Already planning. Already preparing. That's the Cumbee way: process the pain, don't build a house in it, keep going.

“He can take your ashes and make memories," Scott says. “The only problem was the enemy didn't kill us. He didn't destroy us. And since he didn't destroy us, I'm going to praise my Father."

The Next Generation

It would be easy to focus entirely on Scott and Amanda and miss something essential about the Cumbee household: the children are not bystanders in any of this.

Faith, a teenager, is already a published author. Her novel series, The Secrets of Clearwater Creek — a Christian mystery set around four young characters and a sheriff with something to hide — has already grown to multiple volumes, with a third in progress. Her 90-year-old great-grandmother is, by all accounts, among her most loyal readers. Faith gets up at six in the morning and goes straight to the computer, writing before the household is fully awake.

“Father started dealing with me," Scott says with a grin, “because Amanda's like, ‘Scott, she's spending too much time on the computer.' And I said, ‘But Father created a gift and he's developing that gift in her.'"

The book's cover — which Faith designed with her father's help in Adobe — reflects her heart, Scott says, and you believe him when he says it. She's also the one who makes the tzitzit — the knotted fringes that observant Torah keepers attach to their garments as a reminder of the commandments. Rachel Grace, the baby, points to hers with unmistakable pride.

Samuel is working on a children's book about deer antlers, the kind of book that comes from a boy who has spent real time outdoors, who knows what a shed looks like when you find one in a field, who has ridden a tractor and felt the bump of something unexpected in the earth.

Scott is teaching his son how to treat women by teaching him how to play guitar — how when you learn those notes, you're preparing a song for someone who doesn't know yet that you're preparing it for her. He is teaching his daughters that they hold the power of choice, that a woman surrenders willingly only to someone who has proven himself worthy of that trust — which is, he notes, exactly how Father draws his people to himself.

“A woman does not mind surrendering to somebody that will protect her," he says, and Amanda is nodding beside him. “It's hard not to submit when you're falling into the arms of someone who loves you."

Ordinary People

They'll tell you, if you give them the chance, that they are ordinary people. It's the word Scott returns to most often. They are not theologians. They do not have seminary degrees. They are a North Carolina family on a few acres of land, growing crops by a pond, riding a UTV on the Sabbath, making music in the evenings, writing books at six in the morning, praying late into the night.

They are building something — a YouTube channel, a small publishing endeavor, a store, a growing library of books — but it does not feel like empire-building when they describe it. It feels more like overflow. Like people who found something so good they couldn't stop talking about it.

“We never compete with anybody," Scott says. “But we will try to complete. We'll try to complete what Father's doing in your life."

You can find their books on Amazon and through their website, cumbees.com. The YouTube channel, Cumbees Network, carries years of teaching — and if you watch carefully, you can see the moment everything changes. The early videos look one way. Then, somewhere in the middle, the shift comes. That's where the voice happened. That's where the journey toward the ancient paths began.

“Father," Scott says, with the particular peace of someone who has come through something difficult and is no longer afraid of it, “is a place. He's home. There's room for you."

On Friday evenings in North Carolina, when the sun drops behind the trees and the week's noise finally falls away, a family sits down together and breaks bread. They say the blessing in Hebrew, then in English. They speak over each other. The baby smiles when the music starts.

This, Scott Cumbee will tell you, is not religion.

This is knowing Him.

Scott and Amanda Cumbee can be found on YouTube and Facebook at Cumbees Network. Their books, including The Gift of Shabbat, are available at cumbees.com and on Amazon. For speaking inquiries or to connect with their ministry, visit their website.

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