Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

by John Mark Comer

What we do flows from who we are. Both matter.

What I’m getting at is this: in the church we need to talk about all of life. What it means to be a disciple of Jesus at church and at our job, school, gym, coffee shop, on our day off, when we go shopping or to the theater or on a date, and so on.

The way of Jesus isn’t about detaching from the world and hiding in a mountain cave like somebody stuck in an episode of Lost. Jesus was a construction worker, for decades, in a village, Nazareth. Then he was a rabbi, or a teacher.

In Genesis’s vision of humanness, we don’t work to live; we live to work. It flat out says we were created to rule — to make something of God’s world.

And the same is true of rest. When all we do is work and work and work, day in, day out, with no space, no margin, we grind our soul down to the bone. We become more machine than human being.

So for six “days” God is hard at work, forming and filling the earth up with life. And at the end of the week we read, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”3 This is God sitting back after a long, hard week’s work, sinking into his chair, and thinking to himself, Not bad. It’s God drawing joy from his labor. That sense of satisfaction and fulfillment you get when you’re good at what you do and you love it.

Rest here doesn’t mean God was tired or worn down. It’s an act of delight. God is enjoying the fruit of his labor.

God is an artist, a designer, a creative . . . He’s an engineer, a builder . . . An ecologist, a zoologist, an expert in horticulture . . . A musician, a poet . . . A king, a shepherd . . . But above all, he’s a worker, and a vigorous one at that.