Rhythm of Rest: Stop the Work
What an interesting and personal thought that God is working through the inputs into my life and gently reprimanding me for certain habits I’ve embraced and gently pushing me into thinking about new and better rhythms. As a creature of habit (who dearly loves her habits!), I’m very aware of how difficult it can be to change those pathways you’ve established or fallen into through your routines.
Rebekah Lyons chose to focus on the concept of a Sabbath in her last section about the rhythm of rest. Just this past Sunday, the guest speaker spoke to this exact same concept of setting aside a period to be still. At this particular moment, on this very busy week, the idea of finding 24 hours (each week!) to turn off the regular things going on and to step back and take a break seems like a luxury I simply can’t afford.
Let me briefly paint a picture of my current responsibilities to help you understand my place in life right now. I am a mother of four children, ages 11-17. We are a homeschool family, and I am the primary person figuring out the direction and focus of our learning each year. I am also the person who figures out the “specials” for school, in terms of music, athletics, art, and language acquisition. This fall, I was finally talked into taking on the head coaching position for my daughter’s 12 and under homeschool basketball team. (The season starts in November and ends in February, so this is nothing like a six week commitment.) I made this decision around the same time our church office was trying to hire me for a secretarial position. Although I could not imagine giving the 20 hours that they were asking for, I have been able to job share and do four hours in the office each week as well as an hour or two at home to help out with tasks. I am a room monitor for two hours each week at our homeschool co-op, and I am the room mom for my daughter’s choir (taking notes and e-mailing them out). I teach piano lessons to two different girls for an hour each week, and I work in the church nursery for an hour and a half most Wednesday nights.
Then you add in all the things that my kids do outside of the house in a week: band, orchestra, color guard, handbells, guitar class, piano lessons, violin lessons, sewing class, Bible studies, Power Strength training class, praise and worship bands, Battle of the Books competition, performing arts class, JV basketball, varsity basketball, two different youth groups, and our co-op on Fridays… as well as my husband working full-time as a mail carrier, plus committed to being the JV head coach and the varsity assistant coach - and you realize that you still need to reserve time for doing laundry, grocery shopping, preparing meals, and cleaning the house.
24 hours. Where, in all that, could I possibly find 24 hours to do nothing, to lay it all down, and to just breathe? I appreciate the concept of a sabbath which Lyons talks about in terms of not only a weekly rhythm but also a quarterly and annual pattern. I see the value of the idea of “a truth built into the design of things” and the importance of leaving a field fallow for a year to allow renewal. And yet I struggle with finding a way to incorporate it into my rhythms and to be intentional about guarding a place for this. “If it doesn’t make it on your calendar, Sabbath rest won’t happen at all” (78), Lyons chides us. This woman has wisdom, I’ll tell you that after reading the first quarter of her book so far!
I think I tricked myself somewhere along the way into thinking that “someday” it would be easier. When you have four kids six and under, rest is certainly not something that readily happens. But surely, as they get older, you tell yourself. As any seasoned mom will tell you from experience, children growing more independent does not necessarily mean that your down time grows in a direct proportion along with that.
So while confidence and certainty flowed from my fingertips when I was writing a few entries ago about the idea of taking a tech detox, today my fingers instead feel like they are searching and stumbling across the keyboard. This choice to incorporate a sabbath in a real and effective way and the blessings that flow from that decision are more foreign to me than my natural inclination to choose my children over technology. As I mentioned in another entry, we all have rhythms that come to us more naturally than others.
Perhaps you can kneel down next to me as I internalize this guidance and also confess with me not only your neglect of this rhythm in your life but also your complete inability to even be able to conceptualize how to try to change your path going forward to rectify your ways. “Living the blessed life” - it’s a concept that my mom used to propose as she witnessed people’s lives. People who walk closely with Jesus reap the joys and pleasures of this “Heaven on earth” contentment. Don’t I want that? Don’t you want that too? If you are stuck on this hamster wheel next to me, let’s surrender our desire to be the expert and instead humble ourselves and pray for God to open our eyes for how we can start establishing a new rhythm and for allowing us insight as to how to put Him into the pages of our planner each week.
