Busy Or Rest

In busy America, our chasing-after-the-wind culture hands out an identity badge that we wear with pride. We say "I am busy" the way earlier generations said, "I am well."

I know the pull of it firsthand. Colleagues have told me I am a hard-driving leader who sets high goals and heavy expectations on my teams. That critique lands. Too often, it shows up in my actions, carrying with it the wrong portrayal of work—activity for its own sake, bottomless task lists, projects stacked on projects.

Busyness of that kind is disastrous for anything strategic or long-term. Worse, it is dangerous for our health and our lives. So I want to go after these notions head-on.

Here is what I want my teammates to know. BUSY stands for Being Under Satan's Yoke. If the enemy can keep us in dizzying activity, we become the hamster on the wheel — spinning hard, going nowhere. He is glad to have it that way, because a spinning saint is no threat to the kingdom of darkness. Our identities get wrapped in masks of occupation, ministry, family, and the endless to-do list. And those masks keep us from the truer thing: that we are beloved, rested, children of God.

About six or seven years back, I had a wonderful opportunity to go through Life-on-Life coaching with the late Rev. Richard Bush, graciously facilitated by my former boss at The Alliance. One of the greatest gifts of that season was the teaching on Sabbath — operating from centered rest, and the practices of reflecting, connecting, storying, and journeying. (I may write about these sometime, or pull some notes straight from my journals.)

That teaching undid in me the assumption that Sabbath is something I perform well or poorly. The Jewish thinker Ahad Ha'am turned that around in a single sentence: "More than Israel has kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept Israel." Read it twice. We imagine we are the ones keeping a discipline, when in fact the discipline keeps us—holding a people together across centuries of exile, with no land and no temple to hold them. Abraham Joshua Heschel, who wrote the small and luminous book The Sabbath, said the Sabbaths are our great cathedrals: holiness built not in space but in time. You cannot be busy inside a cathedral. That is rather the point of one.

So if BUSY is a yoke, REST is the yoke-breaker. Here is the acronym I hand my teams alongside the first one:

R — Reflect. Look back before you charge ahead. Unexamined activity is just motion.

E — Enjoy. Receive the day as a gift, not as a reward you clocked in for.

S — Stop. Shabbat means to cease. Not to optimize, not to catch up. To stop.

T — Trust. The work will hold without you for a day. God does not clock out when you do.

The poem below names what rest gives us. These four letters name what it asks of us.

A better yoke

The invitation is not to a yokeless life. Jesus offers a swap: come to me, all who are weary and burdened, take my yoke, and you will find rest for your souls — for his yoke is kind and his burden light (Matthew 11:28-30). Two yokes are on offer every week. One drives you at a pace that never ends. The other has a seventh day built into it.

And a Sabbath rest still stands open for the people of God, which is why Hebrews gives us the strangest command in Scripture: make every effort to enter that rest (Hebrews 4:9-11). Strive to stop. Work hard at letting go. I am still learning it.

In light of busyness and rest, here is a poem I wrote a couple of weeks ago. I call it "Busying and Resting."

Busying or Resting

Busyness tends to make us busy,
Very few people know it's hell's age-old technique,
To keep you well -  trapped in BUSY
For Busy is 'Being under Satan's yoke'
Busy Bees chained to busying activities, addicted &
cocaine-ed - chaining us to abysmal absurdities.

In Resting and Reflecting is true living,
Very few people know it's heaven's age-old strategy,
To keep you from perishing
For Rest is 'Restoring, Enriching, ever Seeking Truth'
Like gliding eagles  flying above the storms, keeping us
Renewed and strong, living freedom in God-filled wonders.