3 Ideas about Rest that Have Changed Me

As I write this, I’m getting ready to log out for the next two weeks. Each year during the last week of June and first week of July, Blueprint Schools closes its offices for summer break. The reason I’ve committed to this? Resting is difficult for me to do.

If you know anything about CliftonStrengths, just telling you that Achiever is my number one would probably be enough to convince you that I struggle with the rest-thing. But I’ll also round out the picture for you: I have Strategic, Intellection, Competition, Responsibility, and Focus in my top ten as well.

Yikes.

While I’m learning to appreciate the strengths God gave me, I’ve also invested in counseling and coaching. These caring professionals and mentors have helped me study the ways I’ve carried my past, my work, and my roles as wife, mother, and business owner. We’ve identified things that have been helpful…and the things that haven’t.

There have been three ideas in particular that have significantly changed me.

ONE: Rest is not optional.

For some reason and for most of my life, I believed differently. I skipped right over the fact that God not only tells us to rest in His Word, but he goes so far as to model it for us. God rested on the seventh day. He commands rest in the Ten Commandments. Jesus himself took time to pray, sleep, eat, and pause from his work of preaching, leading, and healing.

For some reason, with all these examples, I didn’t really get the message. When I heard “rest” in all these examples, I conflated it to spiritual rest only. But God created humans with both physical bodies and spiritual souls. We are both things, and we are created for both spiritual and physical rest. In recent years, it has been amazing to watch scientists and psychologists discover just how vital rest is to our bodies, proving what we already know from Scripture. But knowing that rest is not optional for humans wasn’t enough for me. I needed to understand and believe two other things, too.

TWO: Rest is trust.

One reason I struggled to rest is because I didn’t believe I could. The project wouldn’t get done! People would be alone! Things wouldn’t work out! The timeline wouldn’t get met!

While there are times in life where we truly must push through, most of the time we can find another way. Most of the time, my worries about things not getting done are rooted in a simple lack of trust that God will provide, that he gives us manna for the day, that he is bigger than the tasks on my list and the problems I’m facing. Yes, he works through me as his hands and feet, but he is also almighty, in control, and always present. He doesn’t call us to success or completion, numbers or to-do lists; God calls us to faithfulness and to trust. Faithfulness to both work and rest. Faithfulness to both our families and our teammates. Faithfulness to quiet and to forward motion. In recent years, I've learned that rest is the time that calls me to remember that God is in control and that he is faithful completely. Rest is also the time that he reminds me of the most important truth, the final idea that really helped me commit to resting consistently.

THREE: Rest in the truth.

The farther I dug into the idea of rest, the more I realized that a lot of my resistance to rest was because I didn’t believe that God loved me unconditionally. That while I confessed with my lips that God loved me, my heart still believed that I had to hustle and work and earn that love. I was so far off, even though I had been a Christian for years.

I’ve worked to untangle this lie from my heart. And resting regularly has helped me do that. Resting is usually the time I’m able to read God’s Word with focus, letting the Gospel sink into all my fears about not being enough, not measuring up, not meeting everyone’s needs. I have so long equated love with earning it, pleasing other people, and being helpful. I have long been afraid of what would happen if I trusted God, said no, honored my limitations, and practiced boundaries.

I’ve realized that just like giving our firstfruits helps us learn to rely on God and trust in his enough-ness, resting teaches us to similarly budget our time more thoughtfully. If we commit to rest, we must take thoughtful action to make it happen. We might have to unlearn the habits of decades. We will be going against the culture of busy-ness. We will probably have to make tough decisions and deny some of our own desires. We might have to ask ourselves tough questions like:

• If I am always telling people I’m busy, doesn’t that mean I need to change something?

• If I’m overly busy, is it because I’m stuck in a victim mindset—or because I take pride in having too much on my plate?

• If I’m always late or frantic, might I need to create more margin?

• If I have to stay at school every night until 10pm, is that because I struggle with perfectionism or people pleasing or avoidance of a bigger issue in my life?

• If I can’t say no, have I made work an idol or my identity?

These are tough questions, but summer is a great time to ask them. This season can be a wonderful time for rest and reflection, but only if we truly stop to do so. My prayer is that you embrace all of these ideas and this God-provided time to rest. I’ll be working on them right here beside you.

We will see you in July, where I can’t wait to share what we have planned for the 25-26 school year!

What’s Next?

This Summer, Don’t Rest Alone
Share this article with a friend or teammate. Bonus points: grab coffee or lunch together and talk about what rest looks like for each of you. Which of these truths are easiest to believe? Which are hardest? You don’t have to figure it out alone.