The Israelites in Exodus had their golden calf, and the idol I worship is my to-do list.
Through my obedience to this list, I can be productive—sometimes very productive, sometimes even severely so. I list out what I am determined to do and I map out when I will do it. Then, I force myself to follow each step of that plan whether there is joy in it or not. Where joy is absent, the work still gets done through the power of my striving, but the product is loveless and I am left drained by the effort.
This blog is an experiment in a different way.
According to any 2D snapshot of my life, I do not have time to do a blog. There is a family, a job, and so on. My faith therefore includes the expectation that the picture is 3D instead, with an additional dimension to the work that I don’t traditionally factor in. I felt led to begin this blog, by which I mean that I felt an unexplained sense that my doing this would bring me into greater harmony with my place in God’s plan. Perhaps that sense is incorrect. But if not, if it is true, then God will provide the means for me to do the work he has for me—endowing me with, among other things, sufficient enthusiasm to make abundant use of whatever time I have for this project. I am already doing as much as I can do through striving. Rather than being “productive,” therefore, I now need to be fruitful, which is something altogether different. And to be fruitful, I know I need to learn better how to rest.
God does have work for each of us to do. It is challenging work. But it is also natural work, tailored to each person’s individual gifts and potential. Each of us has his work cut out for him—cut out by God—and God is there to do it with us. That is why we go to him first.
There is a biblical model for the relationship between work and rest that is upside-down from the way we usually think. I am thankful to Pastor Denis Beausejour at MCC for teaching this. Look to the order of creation in Genesis, he says. We tend to think of rest as the reward and the luxury that comes only after the work is done, but this isn’t the way God created man. Man came on day six, and day seven was the day of rest. In other words, the very first thing man did (after seeing some animals and giving them names) was to rest in the presence of his Creator.
We rest first. We rest in order to fully begin the work. We do not fully work first, in order to be entitled to rest. I practice this biblical model, and I grow to appreciate how much sense it makes. However, one obstinate impediment has been my discovery that I don’t necessarily know what “rest” really means.
Does rest consist of idleness, for example? My picture of rest has tended to emphasize this, as if rest demands idleness instead of merely permitting it.
Does rest consist of sleep? I continue to re-discover how much power simply having enough sleep gives me, when it comes to living in truth instead of succumbing to the whispers of lies.
However, idleness is drudgery during times when we wish to move—particularly when we are fresh with energy because we have been recharged with sleep.
As for the sleep, people who are prone to migraines know that too much of this can actually be painful.
Instead of inactivity alone, I am finally coming to the insight (forgive me if this is obvious to you) that rest can also include activity.
In fact, activity and inactivity are beside the point. The nature of rest is not to lay down activity in order to be idle, but to lay down idols in order to be free.
God is creative. He is endlessly so. God is the ever-creating inventor of all that is, and he is always up to something new.
By contrast, we have our agendas. We have our expectations and plans. We couldn’t function without them; they are the tools we use to make sense of the world. But within every one of these pre-defined purposes of ours lay the seeds of death. A plan, an agenda, a to-do list, or any other created thing becomes an idol—an object of lifeless worship—as soon as we place our obedience to that thing ahead of seeking the love and newness of God.
To rest, to fully be with God and draw upon his power, let go of these agendas for a time. Try shutting off the “shoulds.”
Not all of our obligations can be neglected at will. Jesus showed this very thing in the way he tended to needy and suffering people whether it was a day of rest or not. However, each of us can take a break from the more nagging obligations that weigh us down. For the span of a moment, a day, or a season of rest ... try to resist doing any of those things that you simply feel as thought you “ought” to do. A particular “ought” might come from the fear of falling behind, or from the worry that someone is expecting something and is prepared to judge you if you don’t deliver. Turn away from habits, too. Resist eating if you don’t feel hungry. Resist turning on the TV out of the expectation that you “ought” to fill the silence. In fact, resist opening the Bible, if the only reason for doing it is the idea that this is what a faithful person “ought” to want to do.
What do you really want to do? Take some time to find out.
Let the burdens drop away until you can get down to your own authentic sense of what might seem to be welcome, fresh, or fun in this moment right here and now.
It might be that you would like to sit still in the sunshine. In the slow accumulation of thoughts that this permits you, God might speak.
Or, you might wish to do something that—when viewed from a different perspective—would look like a chore. Maybe you want to clean the garage. If so, there is nothing wrong with that; ours is a God of order. When the Son of God rose from the dead, he didn’t leave the tomb without neatly folding his handkerchief (John 20:7). It is therefore fitting that you might be led to seek God and find him in the experience of putting things back where they belong.
Because: The garage itself is not the point.
Just as sitting still in the sunshine is not the point.
God is the point.
Rest consists of letting go of all of those things that we might be tempted to obey too desperately. By choice, we let them go—so that we can elect to make ourselves available to God instead, wherever he might meet us today.
And then—no small bonus—look at what might happen as well. In the example above, the garage got clean. During the time in the sunlight, those thoughts that came together might have provided the solution to a problem we’ve put off facing for several days. These outcomes weren’t planned and they didn’t come from striving, but instead they were the byproducts of the day’s encounter. Fruitfulness is found in this.
“I am the vine, you are the branches,” says Jesus—according to John 15:5.
Branches, it must be noted, do not make grapes according to their own plan. They do not make grapes through effort or striving. They make them according to their nature, as a result of being plugged into the vine and relying on its flow of nourishment.
I could kill this blog. More accurately, I could turn it into yet another instrument of death in my life. One way to do this would be to impose a to-do list over it. I could cage the blog and me both into a narrow plan for what the blog ought to be, instead of trusting God to reveal gradually what it might be instead.
But another way to bring death to the work would be to not let go of it. I had another draft of this very entry you are now reading. It was much different. I was trying to write about rest without resting, and the lines I was putting together weren’t working. I became frustrated. I tried to flog the lines into shape by lashing them with pencil edits, because I feared that time was running out. I feared, somehow, that I would be failing at this project if I didn’t manage to feed the blog with another entry soon.
Oswald Chambers wrote, “The greatest competitor of devotion to Jesus is service for him.” Just think of that!
Truly—in the false view of rest that we continue to cling to, we perceive that whatever we have identified as “service to Jesus” should not be compromised for the “slacking” that we view rest to be.
But Jesus did not come to enslave us. He did not even come to employ us. He came to have us—to set us free into a relationship with him.
Mercifully, I gave up on lashing that previous draft. I quit and waited. I rested.
What you are reading is what came later, once the work became fun again. The words and the ideas that you read here are not perfect, because I am a flawed and foggy lens for the light of God.
However, the work did flow easily—naturally enough to be like ripening fruit. And in that ripening I find a clue that this project is, for now at least, work that he would continue to have me do.
Through my obedience to this list, I can be productive—sometimes very productive, sometimes even severely so. I list out what I am determined to do and I map out when I will do it. Then, I force myself to follow each step of that plan whether there is joy in it or not. Where joy is absent, the work still gets done through the power of my striving, but the product is loveless and I am left drained by the effort.
This blog is an experiment in a different way.
According to any 2D snapshot of my life, I do not have time to do a blog. There is a family, a job, and so on. My faith therefore includes the expectation that the picture is 3D instead, with an additional dimension to the work that I don’t traditionally factor in. I felt led to begin this blog, by which I mean that I felt an unexplained sense that my doing this would bring me into greater harmony with my place in God’s plan. Perhaps that sense is incorrect. But if not, if it is true, then God will provide the means for me to do the work he has for me—endowing me with, among other things, sufficient enthusiasm to make abundant use of whatever time I have for this project. I am already doing as much as I can do through striving. Rather than being “productive,” therefore, I now need to be fruitful, which is something altogether different. And to be fruitful, I know I need to learn better how to rest.
God does have work for each of us to do. It is challenging work. But it is also natural work, tailored to each person’s individual gifts and potential. Each of us has his work cut out for him—cut out by God—and God is there to do it with us. That is why we go to him first.
There is a biblical model for the relationship between work and rest that is upside-down from the way we usually think. I am thankful to Pastor Denis Beausejour at MCC for teaching this. Look to the order of creation in Genesis, he says. We tend to think of rest as the reward and the luxury that comes only after the work is done, but this isn’t the way God created man. Man came on day six, and day seven was the day of rest. In other words, the very first thing man did (after seeing some animals and giving them names) was to rest in the presence of his Creator.
We rest first. We rest in order to fully begin the work. We do not fully work first, in order to be entitled to rest. I practice this biblical model, and I grow to appreciate how much sense it makes. However, one obstinate impediment has been my discovery that I don’t necessarily know what “rest” really means.
Does rest consist of idleness, for example? My picture of rest has tended to emphasize this, as if rest demands idleness instead of merely permitting it.
Does rest consist of sleep? I continue to re-discover how much power simply having enough sleep gives me, when it comes to living in truth instead of succumbing to the whispers of lies.
However, idleness is drudgery during times when we wish to move—particularly when we are fresh with energy because we have been recharged with sleep.
As for the sleep, people who are prone to migraines know that too much of this can actually be painful.
Instead of inactivity alone, I am finally coming to the insight (forgive me if this is obvious to you) that rest can also include activity.
In fact, activity and inactivity are beside the point. The nature of rest is not to lay down activity in order to be idle, but to lay down idols in order to be free.
God is creative. He is endlessly so. God is the ever-creating inventor of all that is, and he is always up to something new.
By contrast, we have our agendas. We have our expectations and plans. We couldn’t function without them; they are the tools we use to make sense of the world. But within every one of these pre-defined purposes of ours lay the seeds of death. A plan, an agenda, a to-do list, or any other created thing becomes an idol—an object of lifeless worship—as soon as we place our obedience to that thing ahead of seeking the love and newness of God.
To rest, to fully be with God and draw upon his power, let go of these agendas for a time. Try shutting off the “shoulds.”
Not all of our obligations can be neglected at will. Jesus showed this very thing in the way he tended to needy and suffering people whether it was a day of rest or not. However, each of us can take a break from the more nagging obligations that weigh us down. For the span of a moment, a day, or a season of rest ... try to resist doing any of those things that you simply feel as thought you “ought” to do. A particular “ought” might come from the fear of falling behind, or from the worry that someone is expecting something and is prepared to judge you if you don’t deliver. Turn away from habits, too. Resist eating if you don’t feel hungry. Resist turning on the TV out of the expectation that you “ought” to fill the silence. In fact, resist opening the Bible, if the only reason for doing it is the idea that this is what a faithful person “ought” to want to do.
What do you really want to do? Take some time to find out.
Let the burdens drop away until you can get down to your own authentic sense of what might seem to be welcome, fresh, or fun in this moment right here and now.
It might be that you would like to sit still in the sunshine. In the slow accumulation of thoughts that this permits you, God might speak.
Or, you might wish to do something that—when viewed from a different perspective—would look like a chore. Maybe you want to clean the garage. If so, there is nothing wrong with that; ours is a God of order. When the Son of God rose from the dead, he didn’t leave the tomb without neatly folding his handkerchief (John 20:7). It is therefore fitting that you might be led to seek God and find him in the experience of putting things back where they belong.
Because: The garage itself is not the point.
Just as sitting still in the sunshine is not the point.
God is the point.
Rest consists of letting go of all of those things that we might be tempted to obey too desperately. By choice, we let them go—so that we can elect to make ourselves available to God instead, wherever he might meet us today.
And then—no small bonus—look at what might happen as well. In the example above, the garage got clean. During the time in the sunlight, those thoughts that came together might have provided the solution to a problem we’ve put off facing for several days. These outcomes weren’t planned and they didn’t come from striving, but instead they were the byproducts of the day’s encounter. Fruitfulness is found in this.
“I am the vine, you are the branches,” says Jesus—according to John 15:5.
Branches, it must be noted, do not make grapes according to their own plan. They do not make grapes through effort or striving. They make them according to their nature, as a result of being plugged into the vine and relying on its flow of nourishment.
I could kill this blog. More accurately, I could turn it into yet another instrument of death in my life. One way to do this would be to impose a to-do list over it. I could cage the blog and me both into a narrow plan for what the blog ought to be, instead of trusting God to reveal gradually what it might be instead.
But another way to bring death to the work would be to not let go of it. I had another draft of this very entry you are now reading. It was much different. I was trying to write about rest without resting, and the lines I was putting together weren’t working. I became frustrated. I tried to flog the lines into shape by lashing them with pencil edits, because I feared that time was running out. I feared, somehow, that I would be failing at this project if I didn’t manage to feed the blog with another entry soon.
Oswald Chambers wrote, “The greatest competitor of devotion to Jesus is service for him.” Just think of that!
Truly—in the false view of rest that we continue to cling to, we perceive that whatever we have identified as “service to Jesus” should not be compromised for the “slacking” that we view rest to be.
But Jesus did not come to enslave us. He did not even come to employ us. He came to have us—to set us free into a relationship with him.
Mercifully, I gave up on lashing that previous draft. I quit and waited. I rested.
What you are reading is what came later, once the work became fun again. The words and the ideas that you read here are not perfect, because I am a flawed and foggy lens for the light of God.
However, the work did flow easily—naturally enough to be like ripening fruit. And in that ripening I find a clue that this project is, for now at least, work that he would continue to have me do.
