Why We Need: Rest
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Warren Zevon
Rest is difficult for many of us. It doesn’t come easily, and it’s not easy to accept even when it is available. Instead, we come to believe that a mind racing, a heart panting, and a body straining is the normal state of affairs, even one that is to be lauded and sustained at all costs.
Often, we don’t realize the magnitude of the cost until the bill comes due.
The reason for difficulty with (or aversion to) resting is multi-faceted, but rooted in the fundamental aspect of our life: mortality. To be mortal is to be subject to death—not just the event that terminates life, but the principle of death that works itself out in all of our various vices. This principle of death is always stirring within us, birthing the unholy trinity of fear, guilt, and shame.
Each is an obstacle to rest in its own way.
Fear exists on a spectrum, from minor anxiety to sheer terror, and it is fundamentally about expending energy in self-protection. A mortal naturally does this, because there are innumerable things, words, situations that can cause harm to our heart, mind, and body. We live and breathe in a vacuum of scarcity, where everything—time, energy, wealth, affection—is limited and fleeting, and seemingly procured only by the victors of a zero-sum game. We can’t rest, fear whispers to us, or we’ll lose.
Guilt deprives us of rest because of its crushing weight. Like Atlas, forced to hold up the celestial spheres on his shoulders for eternity, guilt weighs upon our mind and heart, pressing down upon us so as to make peaceful breathing, leisurely laughter, tranquil thinking difficult, if not impossible. Our pains, our regrets, our disappointments and dissatisfactions form a burden we are constantly bearing, a cross we are always carrying.
Shame robs us of repose by trapping us in a cave of contempt and strapping us onto a cycle of striving. Shame is that inner sense that we are unworthy, deficient, somehow lacking and so always needing to prove to someone, anyone, our worth and desirability. It at once exhausts our person while excluding us from the rest for which we so yearn.
So where in this dumpster fire of mortality is there hope for a weary soul? In relationship.
It is, after all, through the severing of relationship that mortality and its fatal fruits came upon us. We ate, we rebelled, we looked to something for life that could not give it, and we lost the intimacy of relationship with the Giver of Life, immediately covering ourselves in shame and hiding from the verdict of guilt.
But now, that Giver has become Redeemer, showing us that to live is to know Him, to walk with Him, to cast our fear, guilt, and shame onto Him for Him to resolve. And in that, we find rest.
It is an odd thing, in any event, that in our mortality and morbid calculations about the way of things we would ever view rest as avoidable, optional, elective, or especially as weak and reprobate. Indeed, to experience rest is part of a life-giving rhythm of health, growth, and flourishing. And it is encoded into everything around us.
A rising and a setting, then rest. A growing season and harvest, then rest. A gestation and a birth, then rest. A hunt and a meal, then rest. Six days of labor, then rest. Six years of sowing and reaping, then rest.
This notion of growth and progress is contained in the word itself. “Rest”, from the Germanic root rasta meaning “a league of miles” or “stage of a journey”, signifies to us that rest is a good and necessary aspect of the adventure, and the need for it an indicator that we have come far enough, for now, and it is okay to set up camp and find relief from our weariness.
Yes, if we listen closely enough, we might hear a voice whispering to our heart, “Come, my heavy-laden son, you’ve struggled long and far enough for now, and it is time to rest with Me.”
“Thus says the Lord: ‘Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.’ But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’” Jeremiah 6:16