The Beauty of Rest

I found that the long MLK weekend was a bit of a roller coaster for our family. It started off with the anticipation of a long weekend, followed by the scramble of Saturday morning errands including my wife's piano lessons and birthday party escorting, the craziness and fun of my son's birthday party, fellowship at church, the euphoria of the Jets beating the Patriots in a game that I had anticipated them getting creamed in, followed by everyone in our family getting hit hard by a stomach bug (with everyone except Sarah losing their lunch), spending Monday laid up in bed sipping Pedialyte (for the kids) or Gatorade (for the adults), and then concluding with the (sorta) relief on Monday night realizing that the bug was a 24-hour thing, and I was reasonably healthy enough to go back to work on Tuesday - a big deal since my work life is currently such that each day I'm out of the office seems to exponentially increase my workload.

It's interesting - this was the second holiday in a row which was marked with me being sick. In this case, having us knocked out on MLK Monday kept us from a planned day trip down to Philly, visiting friends and spending time at both The Franklin Institute and the Please Touch Museum. When I made the call to cancel on Sunday afternoon, Daniel wasn't shy about whining (see previous post) his displeasure at my decision, though I was vindicated when he orally deposited his breakfast all over the kitchen table the next morning.

An old cliché is that getting sick is God's way of telling you to slow down and get rest. I think it's probably a stretch to theologically tie that to any specific Scripture or doctrinal statement, but there's biblical truth in that God does highly value rest - we see this in the creation narrative in Genesis 2 when God consecrates the seventh day for rest. One of my favorite passages in the gospels is Jesus' words in Matthew 11:28:30:

28 “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

That's just a beautiful invitation right there. And who can't relate with the feeling of being burdened physically, emotionally, spiritually and mentally with all the cares of pressures of this world, and to have an invitation to come to Jesus to find it? And yet we still structure our lives (or allow our lives to be structured) in a way which isn't at all conducive to rest. We pack our schedules to the point that it makes us almost nervous to see open spaces in our calendar on our Blackberries or iPhones - gaps just look wrong and need to be filled. We overcommit and sleep is treated as a luxury and something that happens whenever, as opposed to being possessively guarded as foundational to our sanity and physical health.

There's a societal obsession, especially in certain circles, with being productive, which has evolved into an obsession with being busy (not the same thing). I think many of us have lost the good discipline of doing absolutely nothing. I find that 24-hour stomach bugs make a pretty good compulsory practice.