Faith: God commands rest for stubborn creatures like us

I’ve got a question for you. And I’m not kidding in the least. Why is resting so hard?

I understand that finding balance in life is a challenge. But if “too lazy to breathe” is on one end of the spectrum, most of the folks I know err very much in the opposite direction. I’d call that “rest-less.” They need to rest more.

“Rest,” according to one definition, is “freedom from activity or labor.” That sounds rather appealing, almost like something worth an occasional try.

It’s easy to find scads of quotations on the benefits of rest. Lurking among even some of those, you’ll find a few of a rather grudging sort that sound almost like a sop to Type-A hyperactives who won’t say “Good morning” unless it fits into their business plan and the utterance is duly scheduled. Some folks see the need to rest as being a rather embarrassing design flaw in the human organism.

But it’s not. The great preacher Charles Spurgeon really did tell the truth when he said, “In the long run, we shall do more by sometimes doing less.”

A wise doctor knows that sometimes the best prescription of all is simply to rest and let the body marshal its own defenses.

Sometimes the wisest action is no action for a time. And sometimes that plan takes the most discipline.

In great music, notes are only beautiful when the right amount of silence is interspersed between them.

“Rest is not idleness,” wrote John Lubbock, “and to lie sometimes in the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”

And someone (I’ve forgotten whom) has written, “All rest is no more idleness than all sex is adultery.”

When we run incessantly without some rest in our families, we needn’t be surprised when someone in the family becomes the “barometer” who first begins to be in distress.  

Unless we’re in denial (addicts always are), we’d do well to address “rest-less-ness” as lurking near the heart of much of the soul-distress, the lack of joy, the loss of purpose, and the fractured relationships littering so many lives. As individuals, families, and a society, we pay a staggering price for our refusal to listen to the One who made us, to take time to rest (and not turn even that into work), to seek some healing balance in life, and let our souls breathe.

We run and run and run some more. And the God who is real rest and peace, who himself never needs to sleep, even though on that seventh day of creation he rested, smiles and says, “Take time for some time off, child. Get some rest, and let me do within you what you cannot do for yourself. I’ll spin the world for a few rotations without your help. Trust me.”

Of course, our Creator thought rest important enough that he gave us a commandment along that line. He knows us, doesn’t he? What kind of creatures are so thick-headed that they have to be commanded to rest?

Creatures like us.

Curtis Shelburne writes about faith for The Eastern New Mexico News. Contact him at:

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