The cry of our age is “busy.”
How are you? “Busy.”
How’s work? “Busy.”
How are the kids doing? “Their lives are so busy. I feel like I’m just a taxi driver.”
How was the shopping mall today? “Too busy.”
Can you help me? “I’m busy at the moment.”
The
fast-paced busyness of life that pushes God to the margins can easily
turn into burnout. Lots of us are crying out for ways of handling the
busyness before it does.
Yet
expectations of keeping up with everything continually escalate,
courtesy of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Netflix, and the
rest. We are all susceptible to the expectation that we always are available, aware of everything that is happening, and capable of achieving anything.
Unsurprisingly, this demand to be omnipresent, omniscient, and
omnipotent places pressure on all of us, whatever our level of social
media dexterity.
Add some
more ingredients — inadequate sleep, poor dietary habits, caffeine
addiction, the urge to project our preferred identity, a sedentary
lifestyle — and we have the perfect recipe for unremitting anxiety and
restlessness.
But each
of us is, if you like, the chief cook in our own kitchen. We can choose
to rethink the ingredients we stir into the mix of life that leave us
feeling bloated and stressed rather than nourished and sustained. The
24/7 hustle and bustle is of our own making, at least to some extent.
Just as people go on detox diets, we would do well to heed calls for
digital detox and reconsider how much we try to pack into life. A good
starter is the practical suggestions for a twelve-step digital detox
by Tony Reinke, followed with the richly nourishing poetry of Wendell Berry’s This Day.
The
futile attempt to sustain ourselves by our own efforts is not new. Our
digital age simply offers new manifestations of the age-old temptation
to usurp God’s role for ourselves. But against this age-old temptation,
God offers an age-old response: what would happen to our 24/7
switched-on world if the people who came to Jesus for rest (Matthew
11:28) regularly took a day of rest from distraction, work, and
busyness? What would this weekly habit have to offer to the world in
which we find ourselves — a world that restlessly continues to search
for peace amid busyness?
1. Taking a weekly day of rest is a sign that we desire God.
Taking
one day a week to cease our strivings and focus on God shouts out that
we desire God above status, financial reward, promotion in the
workplace, achievement, and all other things that would distract us from
the one we love.
Not
taking time with someone we love when given the chance is a sure sign of
diminished desire to be with them, to reflect together on the good
times spent together in the past, and to consider what the future holds.
When we specifically and intentionally set a day a week aside to focus
on the Lord, as the old covenant people of God were commanded to do as
they journeyed (Exodus 16:23, 25), we signal to the world that our
hearts belong to him.
Treasuring a day of rest and worship lets people know where our heart lies.
2. Taking a weekly day of rest is a sign that we trust God.
Taking
one day a week to let go of our endeavors to survive the present and
prepare for the future shows that we trust God that his provision for
the present is adequate and his promise for the future is sure.
When we
have a weekly rhythm of a day of rest, we stand alongside the old
covenant saints who trusted God to provide for their needs (Exodus
16:22–30). We stand alongside Jesus, who rejected Satan’s attempt to
convince him to look after his own needs, by recalling that we live not
on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord
(Matthew 4:4).
We live
with integrity as people who pray “give us this day our daily bread”
(Matthew 6:11), and then trust God to do it. As finite creatures, we
declare our trust in the resources of the infinite Creator, who provides
us with every blessing (Ephesians 1:3; 1 Timothy 6:17). When we commit
to enjoy a weekly day of rest in the busiest seasons of life (see Exodus
34:21), we declare our trust in God even more loudly.
3. Taking a weekly day of rest proclaims Christ’s supremacy.
Taking
one day a week to loosen our hearts’ grip on our own achievements clears
space for remembering and reminding each other of Christ’s
achievements. Everything we cannot do, even with endless striving,
Christ has done already. In our rest, we proclaim that he has fulfilled
the requirement of perfect obedience to his Father (Romans 8:3–4). We
proclaim that he has provided the true rest our pursuit of leisure
activities and restless sleep cannot provide (Matthew 11:28–30).
Since
those who die in the Lord will rest from their hard labor (Revelation
14:13), resting one day a week now helps us to remember and prepare for
that future, when at the name of Jesus every knee will bow and every
tongue confess he is Lord (Philippians 2:10–11). We declare that our
ambition is much bigger than career progression, or status elevation, or
completing earthly tasks — it is to make Christ known.
4. Taking a weekly day of rest declares our freedom.
Freeing
one day a week from the tyranny of the urgent and the never-finished
to-do list reminds us and those around us that we are no longer slaves.
The original recipients of the command to rest one day in seven were
reminded that the Lord rescued them from slavery in Egypt (Deuteronomy
5:15). But for Israel — and for us — redemption from physical bondage
was merely a picture of the greater freedom from sin and death (Romans
6:15–23). We see more clearly than did Israel that we “were called to
freedom” (Galatians 5:13), and therefore our cause for remembrance and
celebration is greater.
We take a
day of rest not by obligation, but out of a greater desire to pause, to
remember, to look forward, and to worship. Declaring that we freely
choose to celebrate freedom is a message sorely needed by those who are
enslaved to the obligations of busyness and who feel like they cannot
escape the tyranny of burnout.
