Light bulb moments strike when you’re least expecting it. Last week when I was minding my own business and teaching a student I said something I’ve said about 3,711 while teaching piano. “Please make sure you count that rest.” Wait. Pause. Rest.
Most of my students tend to rush the rhythm of the songs. And taking the time to count out a whole measure of resting is like torture to them. As adults in a bustling world I think we might have the same mentality though. We rush around just trying to get done what we’re doing to get on to the next thing. Or we try to hurry through this season because the next one looks more exciting, happier, you fill in the blank. We look down on rest or at the very best consider it a luxury.
What if we’re doing ourselves more harm than good by racing along? What if the rests are just as important to what we are doing? What if the rests are actually vital? Maybe, just maybe, the scriptures are on to something when they say that God rested on the 7th day. If anyone doesn’t need rest it’s God but he does anyway.
It’s in the pauses of the song that the other melodies and sounds round out and feel richer for having the moments of quiet. The space in between the notes is just as important to the intent of the author of the piece as the notes are.
I don’t know about you but I feel guilty when I rest. Just this past week I was determined to take a day off at home and rest since I haven’t been feeling too great. Yet when my rest day finally got there I cleaned like a crazy lady and did laundry and made dinner and all sorts of things. It’s not that those aren’t wonderful things. It’s not that I didn’t feel better when I was done cleaning (mentally, not physically…) but it wasn’t rest. I want to feel productive and like I’m doing something.
Rest is doing something. Real rest is productive. Rest resets our thinking and gives us a chance to breath. The pauses are just as important to our life melodies as the notes are. We come face to face with our own humanity when we pause. More than that though I think we can see God in the rest. “Be still and know that I am God”, he says. Rest reminds us that God is in control. How can we hear his still small voice if we’re always rushing around hurrying the rhythm along? After rest we may just hear his love notes a bit more clearly and distinctly.
I am certain God designed rest from the beginning. Look at the creatin pattern… six days of “heavy lifting” creating everything we see and know… then… REST. Even in the commands given man throug Moses on the mountain, it os inescapably clear: six days SHALT thou labor and do ALL they work, and the seventh SHALL BE to you a sabbath of REST. In that day you shall do NO WORK. (of course we all-knowing humans have created a rather longish laundry list of thise we must/mustn’t DO on that day……. funy lot, we?).
Somehow God made it through my thick and oh so driven skull a few years back and made it clear to me that rest IS critical, and for our good. I read, when trying to learn about how to better train for hard cycling, that rest MUST be a part of the training regime, else you will get “overtrained” and lose conditioning and performance. That concept began to flow into other aspects of life, and I’ve mostly adopted the attitude that, come Sunday, nothing is as important as stepping back from “the daily grind”, the whatever it is we do to survive and progress. sure, at times vigourous activity may take place on that day….. but it is always optional, and not related to anything I do to “make a living”. I also find that time spent with other people doing (or not) whatever we dn’t do the rest of the week is restorative, as well.
With your analogy i music I couldnt help but think of contra dancing.. always done to lvie music, once we learn the sequence of moves for the present dance, we soon find that the moves are counted out and dictated by the melody of the band’s tune. There are rests in some tunes, and if we dont’ count them in their place, our steps get out of place and the whole line collapses. After a whole one need never count out the bars for the tune…. it becomes innate, and we move without even thinking about it. THEN we are realy dancing, and the “fun quotient” goes way up.
Yes, rest….. it is in God’s nature, and He created us in His image, therefore it must be in ours as well.
Exactly!!