My son had a sick day yesterday and spent it lying on the couch. Today he told me he felt like he wasted a day because he didn't do anything. I responded "Rest is not a waste! Your body accomplished so much today!"
Secondly, I had a conversation with someone recently about how it's normal and good to experience some downtime after a surge of creation. This may be physical creation such as childbirth or any mental, social, emotional exertion. It's okay for us to withdraw from a project or a relationship and take a break. In 2018 I was super busy with a couple highly involved projects. And with both projects, I felt it come to an end, and it was OK to let it go.
After God created the Earth, He rested. Even God needs downtime! Rest and recuperation is a Divine concept.
And then a third witness came to me today, a friend sharing on Facebook about stillness. How important it is to stop our busy energy and just be still!
Rest can be taken one day out of the week, or a weeklong vacation out of the year, or a morning meditation each day. For me, with children, my best bet is smaller, more frequent blocks. Like 5 minutes every hour, just turn the noise off and breathe. But I think we need to work all of these variations in.
Another thing to ponder is that we have multiple components to ourself and they all need rest in different ways or different seasons. Sometimes we might even build one aspect of our lives in order to rest from a different one—such as working out to get a break from studying, or the opposite, reading a book to get a break from physical activity! Sometimes we need to take a break from our internal world and go be with people; other times we need to push pause on our social life and spend some time alone.
Also, being reminded of this concept allowed me to have grace for myself since I haven't been as "productive" as I like to be in a while. I'm like my little boy saying "Ugh all I did this last year was lay around growing a baby and now caring for her. I feel like I got nothing done!" And I need to remember, you got plenty done and you are doing something amazing.
A time and a season for everything. Make sure to get those seasons of rest and stillness, whatever that might look like for you.
-- Sent from Gmail Mobile
No comments:
Post a Comment