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needed me,
my motivation to stay healthy and whole.
Fast-forward to 2007. New Life Church in Colorado Springs came calling, wondering if I’d be interested in being the new senior pastor.
“Speed of the leader, speed of the team; the reason your staff is exhausted and cranky is because you are behaving the very same way.”
This is how so many of us find rest, isn’t it?
But I liked how success felt. I didn’t want to unplug. I didn’t want to relax.
Anxiety increases and they lose perspective on their problems because they don’t have time to think constructively.
reducing chaos, while recognizing that in many cases, a certain amount of chaos is going to be part of the equation for a while.
To count God’s thoughts as precious assumes I am first even aware of his thoughts.
Can anybody say they have even a feeling on God's thoughts in your/your family's life?
Ultimately, every problem I see in every person I know is a problem of moving too fast for too long in too many aspects of life.
Speed is the single greatest threat to a healthy life, and it is also our greatest defense.
We’re breathing, yes. But are our souls even remotely alive?
enough.
when we free ourselves from the inner vows we’ve made—the ones that keep us spinning, whirring, running, racing—that we take our first steps toward rest.
What are my inner commitments? The things I don't even have to be asked before I do them? The implications of my agreeing to do something comes with an extra level of commitment to complete some things.
his pace.
my family and I sort of institutionalized the practice of ditching impression management and working toward a quiet, gentle spirit instead. Once a week, we’d hole away for an entire day with nothing on the agenda and nobody to impress. We would wake when our bodies were done sleeping, instead of being jolted by a blaring alarm. We’d ignore the hands on the clock and open our own hands to an unscheduled day. We’d eat when we got hungry, move when we got antsy, rest when we got weary, and let the day come to us instead of maniacally chasing it down. Smartphones weren’t the rage yet, but desktop
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the way Jesus conquers the world is not by acts of war but by acts of pervasive peace. It is peace that brings us to Christ. It is peace that saves our souls. And it is peace that saves our weeks from peril, the peace of a day of rest.
In Jewish tradition, there is a name for this: “Shabbat shalom”—literally, “may your day of no work be peaceful.”
when senior leaders don’t rest, nobody rests.
I know you’re doing all these good things for God, but these good and godly things are going to undo you in the end.”
if we don’t give 100 percent every minute of every day, we are not deserving of our role.
A New Zealand Prayer Book has a fantastic prayer in it called “Night Prayer,” and one of the stanzas reads, “It is night after a long day. What has been done has been done; what has not been done has not been done; let it be.”3 Do what you can do and then “let it be.” Really. Life will go on.
New Life staffers know full well that I expect them to do their jobs in less than fifty hours a week and that they are not to be away from their homes more than two or three nights a week for the purposes of doing ministry.
One of two things clearly is wrong: they have too much to do and we need to revisit their task load, or else they are not working smart.
To refuse Sabbath is in effect to spurn the gift of freedom. It is to resume willingly what we once cried out for God to deliver us from. It is choosing what we once shunned. Slaves don’t rest. Slaves can’t rest. Slaves, by definition, have no freedom to rest. Rest, it turns out, is a condition of liberty.… Sabbath is a refusal to go back to Egypt.4
In 1 Corinthians 7:29–31, the apostle Paul wrote, “I do want to point out, friends, that time is of the essence. There is no time to waste, so don’t complicate your lives unnecessarily. Keep it simple—in marriage, grief, joy, whatever. Even in ordinary things—your daily routines of shopping, and so on. Deal as sparingly as possible with the things the world thrusts on you. This world as you see it is on its way out.” Keep it simple. Uncomplicated. Dealing as sparingly as possible.
Or the illusion of control, at least.
I think this is very true; we confuse being in control with not having something else take control from us (another person, job, God)
fear of missing out.
might
what pleases God is not what we do—even though this thing is something I really, really want to do—but rather who we are. What pleases him is that we stay close, that we stay hidden away in him.
life won’t be contained in simple math.
legalism at its worst.
Rather than pay for additional medical and psychiatric interventions, she would simply pay attention to her son. She would apply her investigative journalist’s eye to the struggling young man living under her own roof and see what she could learn. She would slow down, step back, let go of her expectations, and take in life through a totally different lens.
“If I’ve learned anything by now, it’s that kids like Buzz do best with parents who aren’t having tantrums right back at them, or even frantically checking e-mail every five minutes—parents able to listen closely and explain things patiently and repeatedly. Yet this sort of self-control so easily eludes me when I’m in my default mode of scrambling around in frustration over projects left up in the air.”9 And so she would practice—practice listening closely and explaining things patiently and generally avoiding the chain reaction that tumbles forth when a parent responds angrily, judgmentally,
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When you and I don’t say yes to God’s form of rest, we will say yes to a fraudulent form of rest, cooked up by the Enemy of our souls. We will say yes to porn or to booze or to drugs or to gambling or to idle chatter or to extravagant spending—all in the name of “unwinding.”
I’d use up by imagining conversations with this person. I’d replay in my mind the last exchange we’d had, and then I’d play out what I wanted to say next, as well as how I thought he’d respond.
To this issue of minding our minds, I once heard a story of a monk who, in the course of everyday life, periodically rang what’s called a “mindfulness bell.” People nearby who heard the bell would stop what they were doing and take three silent, mindful breaths. Then they would continue their work, awakened ever so slightly by the simple act of pausing, of breathing, of practicing mindfulness.
Maybe you set a bell chime as your ringtone, and thus it sounds each time you receive a call.
This gets back to the can-versus-should argument, doesn’t it? Perhaps Moses could have done the work, but should he have? Of course the answer is no.
Workaholics will shake their heads at this logic, but I wonder if God smiles.
he prefers our plans to center on him.
the last thing I want to suggest is that legalism will do us any favors; it won’t.
ruthlessness paves the road to reliable rest.
“Ethics become a luxury as the speed of our daily lives increases.”5 In other words, we don’t have time to be do-gooders, when doing good will take too much of our time.
poop
God says, “I’m here. Let me give you rest. And then from that place of restedness, I’ll help you to be light in a very dark world.”
“To keep Sabbath means to stop,” Keri Kent said. “Stop working, stop telling people what to do, stop running your household. See if you can model restfulness well enough that your calm pervades your home and even your family.”
Everything goes better when that thing is done from a place of peace.
retreat, refresh your soul, and renew your focus. That’s it—the three tenets of effective rest.
