Rest
When God created the earth, He was able to create it in six days. On the seventh day He took a day of rest. Not due to the fact that He was getting tired or didn’t have anything else to create, but because He knew the value in taking time away from work.
I am not an expert in getting proper rest, but merely someone who knows when more rest would help. In order to get more time to rest, we need to plan to not work and protect that time. We may have to say no to some good things so that we can stay on our “A” game through life. Taking time to rest will help relieve us of the lie that we are needed to do everything to keep the world going.
There are all kinds of positive benefits for taking the rest we truly need. Some of those benefits are to: restore, recover, recline, reflect, relax, replenish and renew.
As an aspiring endurance athlete (also amateur), a logical thought is the harder I work to improve, more that I push myself, and the faster I work – the better I will become. For about a summer I did that. I worked really hard and rode my bike nearly every day pretty hard. And after a while, I was getting worse. I had less of a desire to ride and was getting more frustrated to not see significant improvement. This began the realization process for me that my rest was just as important as the time training. Time to stress the body is just as important as the time a body needs to recover.
“Then he said to them, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.’”
- Mark 2:27
- Are you getting the rest that you need?
- Have you made time for rest lately?
Mark is struggling to rest during a weeklong vacation from work. Despite being a last minute vacation after a busy season that requires rest, it is still hard to rest.