Give It A Rest
By editor on Aug 14, 2009 in Featured, Health & Fitness, Lifestyle
GIVE IT A REST
By Ed Gungor
Learning to work well is great, but working well is not enough to have a balanced life, you must also learn how to stop working. That’s called rest. The ancient Hebrews called it taking a Sabbath. It was one of God’s Top Ten. Scripture records, “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.” Keeping something “holy” means you are committed to doing it, period.
But we don’t commit to Sabbath. In our helter-skelter, fast-paced world rest has gotten a bad rap. When was the last time you got a pat on the back for taking it easy? We are an active people with a “production” mentality. If you can work 80-90 hours a week, serve on a civic board or two, coach your kid’s soccer team, get by with five to six hours a night, you’ll be held in highest esteem. The more you produce, the more value you will hold in the minds of people around you.
In our overachieving world, not many give a rip about rest. We’re the busy beavers. Yet, rest was just as much God’s idea as work. And just like God works, God rests. When we don’t get enough rest it hurts us. In fact, doctors tell us that many of the stress-related illnesses people have today find their roots in the fact that we are overtired and burned out. On the whole, we have little more than disregard and disdain for rest. It’s kind of like a potty break for us; we only do it when we have to.
Abraham Heschel wrote concerning the Sabbath: “When the Romans met the Jews and noticed their strict adherence to the law of abstaining from labor on the Sabbath, their only reaction was contempt. The Sabbath is a sign of Jewish indolence, was the opinion held by [the Romans].” But we need to rethink that position on rest. Rest is actually God’s gift to us, a reward at the end of hard work. Back to Heschel, “In defense of the Sabbath, Philo, the spokesman of the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria, says: ‘On this day we are commanded to abstain from all work, not because the law inculcates slackness….its object is rather to give man relaxation from continuous and unending toil and by refreshing their bodies with a regularly calculated system of remissions to send them out renewed to their old activities.”
If you refuse to rest, it will catch up to you, which means rest is not an option—you will rest. It will either be something you learn to do on your own or something you learn through a heart attack or some kind of emotional breakdown. I think most of us would prefer choosing the “when.”
When you don’t have enough rest, you begin to lose perspective on just about everything.
Leonardo da Vinci said, “Every now and then, go away, take a little relaxation, because when you come back to your work, your judgment will be surer. To remain constantly at work will cause you to lose power of judgment. Go some distance away, because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance, and a lack of harmony or proportion is more readily seen.”
You need to catch the early signals of rest deprivation if you are going to learn how to establish a good work/rest rhythm. They are things like: mental fatigue (having difficulty concentrating or trouble thinking flexibly), irritability (you’re noticeably more defensive, argumentative or angry), anxiety (feeling of restlessness, insecurity, or a general sense of worthlessness), apathy (the “blahs,” you just don’t care anymore, nothing seems interesting or fun), or just plain ol’ exhaustion (you fall asleep sitting at your desk or standing in the subway).
If you believe you are rest deprived do something about it. Otherwise your life will be dominated by fatigue, a loss of perspective, poor judgment, and confusion of heart. Author and syndicated cartoonist, Ashleigh Brilliant said, “Sometimes the most urgent and vital thing you can possibly do is take a complete rest.” And that is the truth. Simple sleep (even in nap form) is sometimes the best eraser in the world.
But in a world full of appointments, to-dos, relational responsibilities, deadlines, and power-lunches one has to sometimes get creative in order to get enough rest. Wayne Oates wrote: “Your world is, more likely than not, one of action. You look for the green pastures and still waters of silence to heal your noisy heart in the middle of a hectic existence. Quelling chaos is probably the name of the game of your life…Begin landscaping your schedule to create some places and times of privacy for your regular cultivation of silence, communion with your inner being, and communion with the Eternal in your noisy heart.” Rest seldom happens by accident.
In our work-oriented, performance-based world, even the time allotted to us where we don’t have to work is usually filled with some variation of work.
In the opening frame of one of the comics from the comic strip “Cathy” shows Cathy standing by her desk after the lunch hour as her co-workers were arriving back from lunch. She asks, “Did you have a good lunch?”
The first guy responds, “Fantastic! I did a forty minute workout and a three mile swim!”
One of the lady execs says, “I dictated all my correspondence in the Jacuzzi!”
“I studied my French language tapes on the stationary cycle!” a secretary boasts.
One young, yuppie-type adds, “I hit my heart rate target zone and endorphin peak while meeting with my broker on side-by-side rowing machines!”
In the last frame you see Cathy sitting alone at her desk with a forlorn look on her face. She apparently only ate lunch at lunch. She asks herself, “Whatever happened to the good old days when ‘Having a good lunch’ meant you got to eat something?”
HOW TO REST
We need to learn rest. But what “works” as rest is a very individual question. Things affect people differently. What feels like rest to you might feel like work to another. Every one has their own definition of too much, too little or just enough.
Just remember rest is a place of renewal. It happens when we choose to forget our problems and all the stuff life jams down our throats and we remember who we are and remember why it is we do what we do. And rest can be snagged in snippets: It’s a few minutes of solitude in the midst of a hectic day; it’s setting aside 15 minutes to go for a walk or power napping after lunch; it’s a time when we pause in the rough and tumble of life and remember a special moment from the past (never be afraid to sit for awhile and think); it’s stopping to look at the pictures of loved ones on our desk and remembering where the photos were taken; it’s pausing a few minutes here and there throughout the day to pray scripture or sing a hymn to God.
When a healthy dose of rest is taken daily, it restores our physical being and renews our emotional and spiritual energies.
Rest that comes from reflection is a beautiful thing. A divine gift. Unpack it. Hold it. Treasure it. Use it well and life will grow sweeter. Harold Kushner writes of restful reflection: “In a world where not everyone will do great deeds or achieve great success, God has given us the capacity to find greatness in the everyday. Lunch can be a hurried refueling; the equivalent of an auto racer’s pit stop, or it can be an opportunity to savor the miracle that dirt, rain, seeds, and human imagination can work on our taste buds. We just have to be wise enough to know how to recognize the miracle, and not rush headlong past it in our search for ‘something important’… The good life, the truly human life is based not on a few great moments but on many, many little ones. It asks of us that we relax in our quest long enough to let those moments accumulate and add up to something.”
Decide to fight for and enjoy the “rest” of your life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
New York Times bestselling author Ed Gungor has been a pastor for more than 25 years. You can follow Ed Gungor on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Sign up for the RSS feed to his blog at ChristianPost.com. His newest book What Bothers Me Most about Christianity released June 1, 2009
This may be used with permission, credited to Ed Gungor 2009
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