Going through some files, I found this precious paragraph from Nathan Bierma’s book Bringing Heaven Down to Earth…What a challenge to me to think about what the contours of my day might look like:
“As contemporary life grows more and more chaotic and frenzied in a society that devotes too much time and energy to work and transportation and not enough to peaceful rest, quiet, contemplation, and patient, relaxed fellowship we need to follow the model of Christ – who had a mere three years to change the world and yet repeatedly retreated to nap on a fishing boat while crowds clamored for more of his time. Rest, he seemed to suggest, will be an integral part of life on the new earth…
Christ-like rest cuts us down to size a and allows us to practice patience for God to bring about the new earth. It might, after all, take some time.”
Archive of ‘Sabbath’ category
Do you ever have those moments when the words you’re reading in a book seem to suddenly start speaking to you? I had that experience today as I was reading a chapter called Listening to Our Exhaustion in Jan Meyers’ book Listening to Love. (I was actually doing research for the upcoming conference on Living the Gospel in Broken Stories, which is going to be a powerful time to consider what God is doing in hard seasons.)
Jan tells about a sabbatical season, when she discovered that her mood swings were just as bad as they had been when she was dealing with the daily stressors. She was concerned, and she began to listen intently to what God was saying. I found her words so encouraging. I’d love to know what you think. What do you think God might be doing in some seasons of difficulty?
“His reply was not, ‘You need to believe me more fully, and I will deliver you,’ but rather a quiet affirmation of his love: ‘Jan, this is your limp. This is where I’ve been found by you from the beginning. It is in this struggle that you have tasted my love for you. I delight in you regardless of your moods. This is not your identity. But you do have to live carefully. You must give yourself more time and space than most people need. You need more rest than many. Continue to listen carefully to how I view this need, and I will tend to you and keep your heart.’ Can you hear what happens in the face of such Love? I felt as though I had lost ten pounds. God was not asking me to battle for relief. He was asking me to allow him to be present in the very thing that torments.”
“God’s estimation of us is never what we imagine we’ll receive from others or from ourselves…we spend too much time in our Christian lives trying to impress others with the way we have navigated around our suffering and calling that godly. I do think it was right for me to ask, seek, knock – for years – for this dread thing not to be a part of my life. It was good for me to ask, as Paul asked for relief from his thorn in the flesh. But there also came a time when, for the sake of intimacy with Christ, I surrendered to whatever he thought best with regard to my health.” Jan Meyers, Listening to Love
Check out this treasure on Sabbath
We are driven because our work brings us power and pride that dulls our deeper desire for delight.
We are far more practiced and comfortable with work than play. We are far better at handling difficulties than joy. When faced with a problem, we can jump into it or avoid it; we can use our skills or resources to manage it. But what do we do with joy? We can only receive it and allow it to shimmer, settle, and in due season, depart; leaving us alive and happy but desiring to hold on to what can’t be grasped or controlled.
Joy is lighter than sorrow and escapes our grasp with a fairylike, ephemeral adieu. Sorrow settles in like a 280-pound boar that has no intention of ever departing. One calls us to action and the other to grace. Which is easier: to work for your salvation with self-earned power of self-righteousness or to receive what is not deserved or owed, but freely given and fully humbling?”
Why not take two — or better yet, ten? Ten minutes of quiet — right now before you chicken out (or I — I always try to complete my own assignments:). Set your phone on silent; set your timer to go off. Close your eyes or keep them open. Remember, dream, enjoy — something — for surely if you are breathing, there is some single joy to contemplate. (I apologize for the preachy tone — it’s to myself:). P.S. This is going to totally throw my schedule off — just think — 10 minutes late for the rest of the day!
It’s been a week full of more work than I can do in a day, and at the end I must face uncrossed items on my to-do list. Earlier in the week, I noticed the low buzz of anxiety tensing my body and turning my stomach ever-so-slightly. I heard the Holy Spirit say, “You’re much better at working than playing aren’t you?” An invitation, not chastisement.
Realizing I needed to work harder at rest 
, I pulled out a book that challenges me to live the radical reversal of Sabbath every day, Dan Allender’s Sabbath. I love this section on the super-abundance of Re-creation, beginning with a rarely-read (for me) verse from Joel 3:18:
“In that day the mountains will drip with sweet wine,
and the hills will flow with milk.
Water will fill the streambeds of Judah,
and a fountain will bust forth from the Lord’s Temple,
watering the arid valley of acacias.”
Dan tells a story told by Belden Lane:
A group of French people brought “a handful of Bedouin leaders to Paris to see the glory of their culture. They saw the Eiffel Tower and other architectural delights with polite boredom. But when taken to see a waterfall in the countryside, they stood in utter amazement. They waited for the surging flow to stop. ‘They refused to leave, adamantly declaring to their French guide that honor required waiting…waiting for the end. Knowing the water could not last much longer, they awaited the moment ‘when God would grow weary of his madness,’ when this wild extravagance would suddenly and finally exhaust itself.” (Dan quoting Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality.”
Nothing they had seen in their world paralleled a gushing flow of water that had run endlessly for thousands of years. We are the Bedouins who have learned to live in the desert of God’s absence for thousands of years, who cannot imagine the inexhaustible glory that has already been given us in Jesus, that pours through the cross and will pour forth with utter glory when he gloriously returns. The Sabbath gives us the opportunity to stand before the endless outpouring of superabundance and fill up our thimble of faith with a drop of bounty ahead.” Dan Allender, Sabbath
I was really coming to the end of myself, and there were few around me who couldn’t perceive it. Unraveling. Stressed. Taut. Edgy.
Was it that circumstances were barraging me more aggressively and relentlessly, or that I was not absorbing the blows of fallen-world-life with the softness of a heart open to shifting agendas? I don’t know. Probably both. All I know is that I needed a rest.
And funny thing, just as I was packing to leave home for about 36 hours (with the blessing of my family and a text message from a friend: “NO MORE THAN ONE HOUR OF WORK; REST!”), a friend sent me a great article (which of course I did not have time to read — until now), on the need for regular rest. Listen to just one little piece and look back at these commandments regarding rest. A great encouragement on a topic I am experientially pondering: Why rest?:)
“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” Exodus 20
“Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor the alien within your gates, so that your manservant and maidservant may rest, as you do. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.”Deuteronomy 5
“Why should we rest? In the first take (Exodus 20), we hear how the Creator made all things – and then stopped to rest, enjoying all the good that He’d made good, so very good. Don’t forget exactly how you got here. Faith awakens and remembers. We serve this Maker by working well and resting well. But in the second take (Deuteronomy 5), we hear how the Redeemer freed His beloved from the meaningless sweat of slave labor and carried those He had rescued into a place of rest and peace. Don’t forget exactly how you got here. Faith awakens and remembers. We serve this Savior by working well and resting well, and also by giving others who toil – even work animals – the pleasures of rest.” David Powlison, Innocent Pleasures
