“Rest is not idleness… or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time” Lubbock wrote more than a century ago.
I remember my mother assigning me this piece to memorise. And how I enjoyed living it! I’d lie in the foldable outdoor armchair, decked with a colourful striped canvas, and RELAX! Yes, I learned to watch the clouds float across the sky. And by my teenage years, I was sure that I saw atoms moving in the space between me and the clouds. I was able to focus even as I thought of nothing. I simply rested.
Do you rest? It is a good thing, a renewing experience. They hymnist, John Keble (1792-1866) who penned O Timely Happy Timely Wise certainly recognised this as he taught us to rejoice in God’s gift of nightly (or daily) rest. I think he must have been reflecting on words from Isaiah’s Lamentations 3: 22-23 when he wrote:
New every morning is the love
our wakening and uprising prove.
Through sleep and darkness safely brought,
restored to life, and power, and thought.
What if we rested more in God and took our sabbath rest? By which I do not mean el sabado or Saturday churchgoing which sabbath keepers like to remind us of.
In tis regard, I know that God’s Sabbath is not time-bound. Unlike the first six days described in the creation narrative in Genesis, God’s sabbath is not time bound, in the sense of ‘there was morning, and there was evening, the seventh day.’
No. You won’t find that. What you’ll find there is that God rested. And of God does, so should we.
It’s good for the body and good for the soul.
It’s good to act every now and then, as if, weren’t we here, life would still go on. In fact, it does. The world doesn’t spin around you, even though it sometimes needs you to spin well for those whose situation you can make better. Don’t take yourself so seriously that you can’t stop to de-stress. Or, stress will kill you. Yes, it kills strong people, young and old people, rich and poor people.
So, you can take the break from earning the almighty dollar? Remember “We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we shall take nothing out.”
So you can’t take a break because that will interfere with your success- academic, sports pr career wise? You might just break a little toe and find that your mobility is hindered, and you can’t go just as fast as your plans dictated?
Why am I writing this?
Maybe, not withstanding what I wrote at the beginning of this post, I am only a retiring workaholic.
I recall the day my superintendent called me and said, “Joan, look at the flowers.”Dumb man, I thought he was. Everyone who knows me knows that I love flowers! I plant those that grow and those that don’t! Of course, my admirers who think that I’m all green thumbs don’t know that because they only see the ones that grow.
Take a break, I say- before you break something in your hurry. And don’t be surprised you might well break something that is bigger than you and you can’t fix it.
Yes. There are lots of things bigger than you- relationships to start with, traditions, organisations, and the list goes on. Sure. I know of situations where somebody mashed up a whole organisation by being so unbearable that everyone else quit.
Yes, it can happen when you keep on pushing too much, pushing people to carry burdens that are too heavy to bear, expecting them to do the impossible.
Take a break. Take a sabbath rest. Simply spent time with the one who renews everything- life and all in it- so well, that the ‘mashed up’ are ‘fixed up.’
As I said, God’s sabbath isn’t time bound. It breaks through time into eternity. You see, resting with God, in companionship with the Renewer, we even get to transcend time! And who deserves this? None of us. But the Lord is simply gracious. Even after we’ve made a million and more messes, if we learn to rest and take stock, we see our foolish mistakes staring us in the face; and we also see One who is prepared to help us try again and do better.
Yes, resting with God does this very good thing. You know what? If you don’t believe me. Just rest. Rest simply because you need it. And I hope that God breaks into your rest and shows you how much more there is to it.