![]() Hebrews 4:11 says, ‘Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience’, referring to the failure of God’s people to practice the kind of faith that would allow them access to the gift of His rest. We’re given the gift of God’s rest freely, but to retain that rest takes hard labor. Rest is not laziness! Paradoxically, it requires work. When we rest in God, we are most emphatically not asleep, but powering forward, because it’s forward motion that counts the most. He’s perpetually in motion, and it’s this great engine to which we attach ourselves, to power our own spiritual journey. It doesn’t denote inactivity-God isn’t about stasis, but is rather possessed of a spiritual dynamism that we seek to emulate in our own lives. sleep that can so damage our physical and mental equilibrium in life.īut God’s rest isn’t synonymous with slumber or laziness. The negativity that comes with dwelling on our anger, our bitterness and our resentment is a dangerous thing, the spiritual equivalent of that absence of R.E.M. God’s rest allows us freedom, and without it we are bound-by the world, and the heavy weights it seeks to yoke us with. That rest hasn’t ceased since the beginning of days, and it is always available to us in Him. God’s rest is that rest He sought on the seventh day after the work of creation, His own freedom from toil. In that rest, we have a freedom-a freedom from anxiety, worry and fear, things we’re devastatingly prone to without it. In God, we have that rest we seek, and it’s a beautiful thing, a harmony we lack in ourselves. But the idea of vacation or physical rest is a shadow of the true spiritual rest that all of us search for, some of us spending our entire lives chasing that moment of stillness. sleep, without which we can fall into a cycle of depression and recurrent illness. A whole silly sub-genre of cinema exists in which the protagonists are seeking rest-an uninterrupted vacation with the family, a celebration, a simple holiday meal-and are denied it for ninety-odd minutes (with hilarious consequences, naturally). There are scores and scores of stories, mostly farcical, that humanity tells over and over about the search for rest. The idea of a need for rest is completely ingrained in us, solace from work, from stress and toil. Comedians may say that timing is everything, but what they really mean is that it’s the pause before the punchline that makes it perfect. Legendary playwright Harold Pinter crafted an entire career around his mastery of the pause between lines of dialogue, that pregnant moment that brings significance. ![]() Artists refer to the idea of ‘negative space’ the absence of content that itself carries weight. The French composer Claude Debussy once famously said, “Music is the space between the notes.” The greatest blues musicians are able to captivate us by playing less, not more. ![]()
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