I would love to tell you all that I had some outstanding revelations I could write about here, but that did not happen. What did happen is that I realized everyone needs a break from the battle. I know the battle has not even become that intense yet, but a break is always nice. I am also thinking about the "rest of God" that is mentioned in Hebrews chapter 4. I must admit, that is a concept that has always confounded me. I have never understood how one could be doing things and also be resting. Perhaps the most valuable thing about writing this blog is that the Holy Spirit teaches me things as I write and struggle to understand Biblical concepts. Even this moment, the anticipation is building that we are all about to learn something about the rest of God.
When I was younger, I had many different jobs. I was a good worker. It seems that as I got older I also became a good rester. I have a tendency to be just a little bit lazy. Maybe that's why my ideal vacation includes more driving than slogging around New York or Boston, walking up and down subway stairs, and running to catch the Staten Island Ferry. I was a little winded after that last one, but this old man kept up with his 25 year old daughter and we made it.
As you can tell, I am something of a wordsmith, a word cobbler if you will. That makes blogging a relatively easy task for me. I have had more than one person express admiration at the quality and quantity of this blog. That is gratifying, but not all that important. I have been training for such a time as this at least for the past 20+ years. If you have been following this blog, you know it has really been much longer, but I had no idea until just a few months ago.
In the past several months I have gone from utter frustration about my life and ministry to apathy to rest. I had been frustrated since the middle of 1987 when it looked like we had heard the Holy Spirit wrong. Nothing seemed to be working out. Granted, that frustration was often simmering just under the surface as the things of life took the front burner. Very few other people knew the frustration was there and I did a reasonably good job of pretending it was not. That period ended about a year ago and I moved into a period of apathy, I just did not care what happened. I put a spiritual kind of face on that and would have told you God had everything under control and was working things out, had you asked. I think I believed that, but I was apathetic so it did not even matter what I believed. Confronting the religious spirit face to face snapped me right out of my apathetic period and set me on the path toward rest. Now all I have to do is remember I am in that period.
Make no mistake, I am a spiritual man, created in the image of God. I understand something about living in the spirit even though I am not very adept at staying there for long. The challenge is that the rest is a soulical rest, but if we are not living spirit led lives, we will never enter into it. The physical world tugs too hard to let us rest in this world absent the work of the Holy Spirit in and through our spirit. Jesus promised us rest for our souls. (Matthew 11:29) He did not promise us physical rest. Rest is not the absence of physical labor. If you can understand it, rest is really the embracing of physical, or perhaps mental, labor as what God has given us individually to do. Let me see if I can explain. As I said earlier, I am a little bit lazy. However, anyone who knows me will tell you, not much gets by me. I do not see and hear everything, but apparently I do a better job at it than most people do. The point is, I am doing something even when I do not appear to be doing anything.
I know automobile and aircraft mechanics, plumbers, and welders, and even doctors who work harder than I probably ever wanted to. They are constantly in motion. I sit here and move my fingers in orderly movements to put words into a computer and shape them into semi-coherent thoughts. (I hope.) The movements are quick and clean and not too terribly taxing on my body. I do not expect to make a lot of money at it, but my support is not my problem. God's grace has already given me more than I ever expected to have. So much for keeping one's expectations low. Anyway, I have now entered into a small corner of God's rest. I do not worry about finances. I just do what God gives me to do. When I look back, I see that I actually entered into that corner several years ago, almost by accident. I guess you could say I backed into the corner.
Like most people we knew, there were lots of times, when the kids were little especially, that we ran out of money before we ran out of month. However, unlike a lot of those people, we never missed a meal and we never missed a payment on anything. One day it dawned on us that God had been quietly taking care of all our needs, albeit at a lower level than we might have liked. Remember, we kept our expectations low so as to not be too disappointed. (And if you are missing that, it is tongue in cheek.) Through all that, we believed God had better things for us. That was something we could rest in.
The lesson is: Find your rest wherever you can. Once you enter into rest in any area of life, you will find it easier to find rest in another and another and another. I am not much of a formula buff when it comes to spiritual things, but it is not an entirely bad idea to find out where you have trouble in your life--where you have not yet entered into rest. Through prayer, meditation and perhaps some counsel, find out why you do not seem to be able to find rest in that area. Do this for each area where rest eludes you, one at a time. It is a spiritual exercise you will find well worth the effort.
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