The Importance of Rest
The Sabbath isn't a break from the rest of the week. Instead, it's a model for how to live.
Jamie Winship is one of the most successful people I’ve ever talked to. He spent decades in active war zones. He’s helped thousands of militant extremists to find Jesus and to lay down their weapons. He’s spoken at Harvard and in front of Congress. He and his wife Donna have raised three very successful children. After retiring from the field, the pair launched a spiritual training and consulting agency that’s helped thousands of people to transform their lives.
If you had to guess Jamie’s secret, you might guess that he grinds 80 hours per week. You might guess that he works all the time, that he sleeps four hours per night, that he’s one of those rare human beings who has forged an iron will and who can run himself into the ground over and over and over again in service of his work.
In fact, Jamie says that the secret to his success is…rest.
In Christian circles, we often think of the Sabbath as an opportunity to rest and to recharge our batteries before jumping back into the grind. We think of the Sabbath as a respite from the other six days of the week. But Jamie describes the Sabbath differently. In “Find Rest and Purpose on a Monday“ he says that “the Sabbath day is to remind you how you should be all the time. At rest.” The idea is to work “from a place of rest, mirroring Jesus’ peace in the midst of a storm.”
I’ve seen the power of this in my own life.
I usually start my day with prayer and meditation. A couple of weeks ago, I felt God inviting me to extend that period of simply being with Him through the entirety of the morning. I immediately pushed back. My argument went something like this: “God, you don’t understand. That sounds great but I have work to do. I have to make money.”
I tried to cut short my meditation and just get on with the day’s work. But I had put myself into a state of stress and white-knuckling. And as much as I tried, pretty much nothing got done that day. I tried to write for hours, and I only got a trickle of words.
Paradoxically, the harder I tried to make things happen under my own power, the less successful I was.
Contrast this to how I was the day afterwards. I woke up and fell into my customary two hours of meditation and prayer. Afterwards, I felt God inviting me into a third hour. And so, even though I had deadlines looming, I just sat there and kept praying. Then I felt God inviting me into writing fiction. The words simply poured out. The came nonfiction, and again it was like someone had opened up a faucet inside of me. When I grounded myself in a place of rest and of trusting God’s providence, everything that I needed to do somehow got done.
This is the only way that I know to be really productive. It’s the only way I can write 4,000 words in a day and still have time and energy for martial arts and date night at the end. It’s how I was able to spend all day traveling and at a conference this past Monday, and then sit down and write two articles in the evening without feeling wiped out.
I think being at rest simply means being with God. Because when we are with God, when we are completely reliant upon His protection and His providence and His holy grace, then the weight of the world falls off of our shoulders. We are simply communing with our creator. And in that place of perfect rest, God can do much more through us than we could ever hope to do on our own.
I think of it like this. Imagine that you are a boat on the open ocean. You are at point A right now, and you’re trying to make it to point B (point B could be a finished project, a successful presentation, a productive conversation with a coworker or direct report, etc).
You could row to B (that is, you could try to get there under your own power). That’s hard work. It’s slow, and it’s exhausting. But it might work, providing that point B isn’t too far away and that the seas are calm.
But, if God actually wants you to reach point B, then there’s another way for you to get there. In addition to oars, your boat is also equipped with a sail. And a mighty wind is blowing.
The wind is God: God’s infinite wisdom, infinite strength, infinite fountain of wonderful ideas that can help you knock whatever it is that you’re trying to do out of the park.
And instead of spending all day rowing, you could spend just a little bit of time setting up your sail.
There are two pieces to catching the divine wind. The first is to actually rig up our sail: to put away the oars and instead to place our faith wholly in God to get us to point B. This is part of what I think Christians mean when we say to God “Not my will, but yours be done.” Essentially, what we are saying is: “I surrender my strength and my will and my goals and objectives for the day. I invite You into my life to take charge, and to lead me in whatever way and towards whatever destination You know to be best for me.”
That act of surrender is setting up the sail.
Then there’s actually adjusting the sail to catch the divine wind. This is how I spend a lot of my time. If I’m in a funk, or stressed out, or full of fear or shame, then it’s a sign that my sail might be rigged up but that it’s not adjusted properly to catch God’s wind. If that’s the case, then the most important work I can do for the day—far more important than just trying to grind at my desk—is to do whatever it takes to adjust the sail. That might look like going for a walk. It might look like exercising. It might look like pushing back from my desk and praying, or playing video games for 30 minutes while my brain relaxes. But adjusting the sail is imperative. Because once the sail is set up and adjusted to actually catch the wind, that divine gale will blow me towards B faster than I could have imagined.
If you find yourself consistently feeling busy, or tired, or worn out, or burned out…maybe it’s time to set down the oars for a day and instead try to catch God’s wind.
Heal the West is 100% reader-supported. If you enjoyed this article, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or becoming a founding member. I greatly appreciate your support.