We need to rest—something crucial to living not only a good life, but a life of receiving what only rest can offer us. Most Americans do not take all their allotted vacation time. Is it out of fear that someone else might replace them while they’re gone? Is rest overrated? Do we even know how to rest? Many people I work with explain their vacations based on activity: the times of skiing in Colorado, swimming and scuba diving in the ocean of Africa, tennis at the club. But tours, sightseeing and fast-moving regimens are perhaps not the best way to experience the rest our souls are calling out for.
Have you wondered sometimes why you’re so tired after a vacation? What did you do on that vacation? How much energy did you expend on mountain climbing, surfing or kayaking? How many nights were you “out” rather than away? How much sleep did you actually get doing all of that fun stuff? If you’re exhausted from your vacation, then it’s time to learn how to take a real rest.
Our culture is in need of learning this most basic skill. We’ve left what we used to know and found ourselves at a dangerous dead end. One of the things we need to learn is how to rest and live within our limits. Author and poet David Whyte opens our minds and hearts to rest when he writes:
Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. Rest is the essence of giving and receiving. Rest is an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually but also physiologically and physically. To rest is to give up on the already exhausted will as the prime motivator of endeavor, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals. To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we put it right; to rest is to fall back literally or figuratively from outer targets and shift the goal not to an inner bullseye, an imagined state of perfect stillness, but to an inner state of natural exchange.
This kind of rest does not come naturally for us in a wired world with busyness everywhere on the outside and stress within us. Here are some guidelines in learning how to rest. Let’s look at the stages of rest—and then practice them.
The first stage of rest: stop.
Before you rest, you must first stop. Stop doing and start being. After all, we’re not human doings, we’re human beings. If you allow your voicemail, texting, and email to go with you on your time off, you’re not having time off. You are still on. Disengage from all forms of technology. Stop the email. Stop the texting. Stop the voicemail. Put everything on “stop.” Set up an auto-reply or, better, unplug. By unplugging, you say to yourself and to others, “I am now detached. I am now truly unavailable to others. I am intentionally choosing to be available to myself, my heart and my soul, and perhaps the few I love who are with me.” If you are exhausted, be exhausted. Enter the exhaustion and don’t force yourself to do anything. Sleep. Nap.
The second stage of rest: slow down.
Practice slowing down as an art form. For one thing, don’t start reading anything. Why? Because you need a bit of transition time to let the swirling wind settle within and without. Besides, you most likely cannot take anything in right now. Be kind to yourself. Eat slow. Move slow. Practice Dallas Willard’s oft-quoted secret of the spiritual life: “Ruthlessly eradicate hurry from your life.” This of course is countercultural— really, it’s a prophetic call to live life differently right now.
Let slow be the new normal. While speed and hurry is the normal back home, now nothing is screaming at you except your body’s care, your soul’s care, and your mind’s care. To repair all of the damage done inside and outside you, you must truly slow down.
The third stage of rest: arrival.
In the death and burial of Jesus, by the third day there was resurrection. If you’ve truly stopped, if you’ve slowed down, then the long-awaited, hoped-for and primal truth of your own resurrection is right around the corner. Trust the process. Give yourself two to three days of slowing and doing nothing before you do anything. By the third day of your time away or your vacation you can read a book, play games, or ride a bike. Ask yourself, “What would give me life today?” Then go and do just that! Do nothing that will not bring you life. Now you’re more alive and more awake! You can stay up late and watch a movie without falling asleep. While awake, you can notice the beauty and take the beauty into that place in you where it will do its healing work.
The fourth stage of rest: play.
This is the indulgence of that simple urge to enjoy, laugh, and bask. It is truly recreation. We recreate the loss of time and space in our lives. We find each other through games and doing those things that are life-giving.
Virginia Postrel, a leading social commentator, writes, “Play nurtures a supple mind, a willingness to think in new categories, and an ability to make unexpected associations. . . . The spirit of play not only encourages problem solving but, through novel analogies, fosters originality and clarity.”
“Nothing lights up the brain like play,” says researcher Stuart Brown. If you feel as if you’re lost and living in a dark space, play could be part of the light you need to find your way back. Remember, we’re told in the Bible to call the Sabbath—a day of rest—a pleasure. Pleasure breeds more pleasure—not dread, not fear, not anxiety, but this beautiful word that is more than a word: an actual experience of pleasure.
You enjoy sitting in the sun; you find yourself finally able to laugh again and know that laughing is good. And you bask—that ancient art of lingering, soaking in and marinating to absorb everything and everyone to the very last drop.
The fifth stage of rest: remember.
Did you know that in the Ten Commandments, the only commandment we are told to “remember” is the Sabbath. Why is this? Most likely because God knew we would quickly forget to rest. We get an A in living by the sweat of our brow. But we don’t get high marks for resting and ceasing. When we remember our time off, we savor the time and we laugh at the crazy things that happened. We recall the good food. We remember the feelings that surged up within us when we saw the mountain vista or sunset at the shore. Remembering is about storytelling, and in every story of how we rested and enjoyed time and life, the soul finds comfort.
Finally, we can anticipate our own reentry to the life we’ve left. But what we just experienced on our respite was real. We make a horrible and tragic mistake when we say only work is real. This is not the truth. Rest is real and until we rest, we run our lives on empty. Rest is the God-given, God-ordained and God-modeled way to truly live.
Taken from Inside Job by Stephen W. Smith. Copyright by Stephen W. Smith. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, www.ivpress.com.
For Further Study:
📖 Read:
💭 Reflect:
- Which stage of rest do I struggle with the most—stopping, slowing, arriving, playing, or remembering?
- Why might that be?
🙏 Pray:
Lord, I want to live within the rhythms You’ve designed. Help me release hurry and receive the kind of rest that restores me from the inside out. Amen.
