God tells us that He created the seventh day and made it
holy because even He rested from his labors in creation (Genesis 2:1-3). This
tells me that there is an intentional effort to be made in resting. J ust as we
choose to work and labor, we must choose to rest. I felt guilty about the time
spent on the sofa trying not to throw up because I felt I ought to be working.
It wasn’t my choice to rest.
Today, as I enter into my third trimester, I am more tired
than before, and some days it’s all I can do to keep my eyes open after lunch. My
body is laboring continuously, and the rest I am getting is more of a necessity
than a choice. More than ever I find myself identifying with Psalm 55:6-8:
I said, “Oh that I had the wings of dove!
I would fly away and be at rest—
I would flee far away and stay in the desert;
I would hurry to my place of shelter,
Far from the tempest and storm.
This part of the Psalm is taken completely out of context.
The Psalmist is talking about having rest from false friends and accusations,
which is not what I am experiencing now. And yet, I feel his desire to flee,
take a break, and get some rest. To go where there is no laundry, no garden, no
to-do list, and no one asking me questions. But this also is not a good
representation of how God asks us to rest.
If you look back at Genesis 2:3, the last part of the verse
stipulates what kind of rest God took: “…on
it He rested from all the work of creating that he had done.” God didn’t
depart from the world He had created, He just rested from creating. God has put
us all in a certain situation in life and when He tells us to rest, He doesn’t
mean depart from our situation, but to rest in the midst of it. So there go my
dreams of a tropical island paradise with a really, really, good library.
Psalm 55:16-18 offers another solution to this dilemma of
rest:
But I call to God, and the Lord
saves me.
Evening, morning and noon I cry out in distress, and he hears my voice.
He ransoms me unharmed from the battle waged against me, even though
many oppose me.
Verse 22 continues:
Cast your cares on the Lord
and he will sustain you;
He will never let the righteous fall.
We definitely have to make the effort. Calling out to God,
crying out in distress, and casting our cares upon Him require us to use our
minds, bodies, souls, and voices. But God is faithful to us and will give us
rest in the midst of our circumstances. It comes down to a matter of trust,
though. Am I going to trust God to help my through my weakness and never ending
to-do list? Am I going to submit those things to Him and chose to obey and
rest? Or will I power through and ignore that seemingly unimportant command to
rest, because I don’t have the time? Do I trust the creator of time more than I
trust my own ability to manage it?
Psalm 55 closes with the phrase: “But as for me, I trust in you.”
The Psalmist knows that the wicked, the liars, the deceitful
of the world will get their due justice eventually, and he is content to trust
in God to rescue him from the fears that plague him.
I’m not going to lie, right now I have no idea how this is
all going to work out. I’ve set some pretty lofty goals for myself for the next
three months. But I am going to try to trust, and remind myself to trust that
God has a plan for me and my to-do list that might look different from what I
want it to, but it is a good plan that will benefit me and my soul. Choosing
obedience in the midst of the demands of the day is not easy, but it is right,
and God will help me to have rest when I show my faithfulness to Him.
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