A better rest

the monthly letter

Some people daydream about what they haven’t had.

On the other hand, I catch myself replaying an earlier time in my life — as if I could will it back and live my present life in the background of this earlier reality.

This daydream of mine comes from nearly twenty years ago. Nate and I had crawled across our finish line of full-time ministry — tired and unsure of who we were when we didn’t have a job that overtly included advancing the kingdom of God. He started what he called a “jobby-job,” and I scaled back to part-time work for a paycheck. I worked in a little boutique on North Barracks Road in Charlottesville, Virginia for minimum wage selling French and Italian pottery to those who made much more than minimum wage.

At first, we both felt demoted — leaving the “hall of fame” we’d created in our minds of those who were in full-time ministry. But then my heart started coming alive in the extra hours, the longer transition times between activities, and the evenings at home with regular bedtimes.

I rediscovered the little girl in me who loved stories. Just like when I was twelve, I began devouring books. We prayed together at night and sometimes even brought out the guitar and sang worship songs. I poked around stores and lingered longer over coffee with friends. I journaled and cooked recipes out of the Martha Stewart cookbook that served, before that time, only as a decoration in my kitchen.

Life was slow and savory.

We slept late on the weekends, kept a sabbath, and took hours-long walks together through the rambling streets of the Charlottesville college town. I can remember the fall of that year as if it were yesterday: soups on the stove, candles lit around our little cottage as we read at night, friends over for long dinners, my heart slowly reviving to sounds and smells and images of beauty that God had given me but I’d been too driven to see before life slowed.

It was a rebuilding and rediscovery time — we both knew it. We lived from rest and thrived from a state of rest, slowly inching our way out into the world (a new church plant, new ministries with our neighbors), carrying cups that sloshed over with fullness.

Those were dreamy times. Ones that filled me then and fill my mind now.

But life has changed since those days.

We added two to our family, then two more. Then somehow, within ten years we filled this house with more people than can legally ride in a minivan — seven lives to grow plus us. And though our home dramatically changed since those days, my picture of rest did not.

Only recently have I realized that I’ve been applying to my life now the same grid for “rest” that we acquired during those just-the-two-of-us days, and I’d been doing it for more than a decade. My life grew exponentially in those decades, but the pants I kept trying to fit my life into did not, and I’ve only just noticed this. Like so many things, the ideal life we live in our minds — whether formed by history or sermons or peering into the lives of our friends — seems to be a far cry from what we actually live or could even reach. But something inside of us is determined to keep reaching. Always reaching for that ideal.

As it relates to rest, many of us are reaching for it in a world that makes it like a rounded pebble heading downhill, faster still each day. We can’t nab it, can’t catch up to it, but it’s still in sight, so we better race after it.

In the middle of the race for rest, if you’re like me, I’ve added to my idealistic picture of rest by reading books on the topic and listening to sermons and podcasts. Something inside of me has craved this rest. And as those whose craving for ice reveals their body’s need for iron, I know this rest is one of the survival strategies for these wild times. So, I’ve done all I’ve learned to reach for what I see myself needing — this elusive rest. But in many ways, I’ve grown more tired in the pursuit.

In my efforts towards rest, I’ve worked myself out of rest.

The real rest.

The better rest.

We all do that in one way or another. We fixate on a time in our lives that was glorious and restful, and we felt alive and unchallenged in our bodies and minds, and schedules. Or, if we haven’t yet had that time, we fantasize about what it must be like — ever-reaching for the dream in our head, the forever sabbatical. We see friends who’ve found vestiges of rest within this crazy cultural moment, and we envy them.

Nate and I traveled last month, and every airport was jammed with people as if it were spring break — women in athleisure and men in Hawaiian shirts, carrying bags from the t-shirt shops where they acquired their travel trinkets. Business travel hasn’t picked up in 2022, but the thirst for vacation from this daily chaos is indicative of the world’s reach to do something — anything — to quell this crazy. Our books and sermons and anecdotal evidence from friends who share stories of rest become an amalgam of a time we dream towards, when we’ll finally feel at peace, finally sigh and slip into the arms of God, sunkissed from vacating away all that impedes our rest.

So, with this note, I wonder if perhaps I’m not the only one with an eye toward a rested soul, toward that true life in God that comes from a sloshing-over mug (filled to overflowing), but who also holds an acute awareness that it evades me. I put rhythms in place that don’t seem to ensure the promised rest, whether owned or challenged. I say “no” more than “yes,” I put firewalls around my time, I seek to discern what to add to my plate … and yet rest tumbles faster down the hill of life and away from me.

Until this last stretch.

It sometimes takes years of movement in one direction, with no shifting, before I might see my “stuck” as something God-ordained. I’m slow to learn, friends. And finally, out of this years-long chase for rest, the phrase dropped into my mind that led me to consider that my legs needn’t be faster, my mind needn’t be more informed, my rhythms needn’t be harder-secured:

“the better rest.”

Hmmm … with one phrase, the air clears a bit.

He offers something even available to the mom of 7 (who can’t take a kid off her “full plate”), the daughter tirelessly caring for her sick father, the husband of a wheelchair-bound wife, the father working the night shift to pay rent, the new mom of twins … the single woman in her fifties with a lot of time and also a lot of anxiety that she can’t put on hold during her sabbath.

This note is less of a “how-to” and more of a question. I’m inviting you into the summer-long question I’m asking Him: dear God, what is this better rest? Would you wrap Your hand around mine and take me there. (I think I’m finally ready.)

I think I’m finally ready.

You, too?

As with the best plot twists, where the surprising relief comes swiftly and from behind, this phrase alone dislodged something inside me just when I thought I had years more ahead of chasing that elusive rest.

There’s another way.

A better way.

Be curious with me?

{I write on topics like this, but at a deeper level — more candid, more conversational, less “for the masses” — over here on SOAR. Join us if this piques your interest.}

Until next month,

Sara

P.S. A cursory beginning study on rest has revealed that His Word has a lot to say about this better rest. I’ve been hanging out in Matthew 11:28-30 and Hebrews 4:1-12. But I’ve only just started …