Processing Life
Processing Life
There’s really a lot of dimensions to life. And as it continues to unfold it appears to get more complicated. Meeting with a pre-marital counselor recently, he mentioned that adults responsibilities double every 10 years. Wow. I was getting excited about making it through this week to the weekend, but that’s really only the beginning. There’s the week and month after that. Followed by next year.
At times stress sure feels like an emotion, but it isn’t. It’s the cause of some underlying issues beneath the surface that we need to deal with. Stress comes from the fuzziness and confusion about our priorities or roles or time management or (lack of) communication or whatever the issue is.
Reading through the Psalms, there are a lot of times where the Psalmist encourages us to “rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him” (Psalm 37:7). Our modern day culture has a hard time with this. We ask questions like, “What does God want me to do?” or “What can I do to get ahead?” These kinds of questions ignore the inherent commands and verbs to rest and wait while focusing on doing. Resting and waiting for God are tough things to do. It’s hard to measure how much we’ve done that and if we’ll be done soon. It may interrupt our lives and force us to say no to other good things.
Just in case you’re like me and you’ve already started to think of more items on your to do list, several verses later in Psalm 37 there’s another reminder “Wait for the Lord and Keep His way” (v34). That’s the way to move from stress to rest – each day wait on the Lord by being in His Word and keep His way.
“This is what the Sovereign LORD, the Holy One of Israel, says: ‘In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength’”
- Isaiah 30:15
Would you say that those around you are getting this rest? Would others say that you are getting this rest?
Mark R.