The Gripps have a dog named "Deuce." Deuce’s great obsession in life is to chase down a ball and bring it back to the human who threw it for him.  Deuce does not know how to give up this obsession. Deuce will chase balls until he drops, literally.

 
Many of us tend to be a lot like Deuce. We don’t know how to rest. We are obsessed with work. Our mantra is, "I am what I do." We work at our jobs, we work at our homes, we work at the church. Stop working, and we can feel lost. Somebody asks us how we’re doing and our habitual response is, "Oh, I’m so busy." In this culture, being overly busy to the point of exhaustion is generally considered the mark of a successful life.

When God gave the ten commandments, do you know which one came in at number 3? "Keep the Sabbath holy." It comes before such things as "Do not murder," "Do not steal," "Do not commit adultery", "Do not bear false witness."

This can seem odd. Why is so important to make room for regular rest? The reason, I think, is that without true rest for soul and body, our lives get out of balance, and we become susceptible to all those other life destroying behaviors: violence, envy, resentment, dishonesty. God does not want us to be exhausted. God orders us, in fact, to enter regularly into a deep restfulness.
 

Think about how you feel when you are really tired. I don’t know what you feel like, but I tend to feel hostile, irritable, jealous. I am convinced that the phenomenon of road rage is consequence of people being chronically exhausted.
 

God wired our bodies with the rhythm of work and rest in mind. Somewhere I learned about our bodies being wired with two parallel nervous systems: one called the "sympathetic system," and it is that part that is wired to respond to danger, mobilizing our energy for sudden action. The other is called the "para-sympathetc system," which is the system that is activated when the threat has subsided; it builds our bodies back up. In our fast-paced, frantic world, the problem is that many of us experience life as a constant crisis, getting stuck with our sympathetic systems in high gear, and our renewing system, the parasympathetic system, never gets a chance to restore our bodies’ vitality.

When we don’t get real rest time, our immune system becomes compromised, and we end up getting sick. Its as though our bodies are saying, "Since you couldn’t choose rest for yourself, I will force you to take a time of rest."
 

It says in Genesis that we human beings were made good -- in the "image and likeness of God", in fact. When we look inward, many of us don’t see much that seems especially good. When we pause our frantic running, what we first tend to be aware of is the irritability, resentment, anxiety and jealousy that arises in our exhaustion.
 

Praying for people in need can easily feel like just another obligation, something we "should do", but don’t especially want to do. A chore placed upon us by the taskmaster god. But an interesting thing happens when we give ourselves opportunity to truly enter into Sabbath Rest: We are surprised to encounter a deep and abiding love.

Every Wednesday morning, we hold a healing prayer meeting in the prayer chapel. We begin with a time of sharing of prayer concerns, and then I lead our group into a time of deep meditative restfulness. We intentionally let ourselves breathe more deeply, slowly. Our need to be in control begins to fall away, and we become aware of God doing something through us, rather than us doing something ourselves. We become aware of a deep compassion -- the very compassion of God -- and praying for others becomes something we want to do spontaneously, not a dutiful labor. We recognize that at the very depths of creation is the good love of God. We come away from this time of praying for others feeling not exhausted, but renewed.
 

In the kindness of Jesus,
Pastor Jeff