Busy OR Rest

 

BUSY: Being Under Satan's Yoke

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 disciplined delight or REST is keeping 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.

God stopped first

Before Sabbath was ever a command, it was a divine habit. On the seventh day God finished his work and ceased from it, and then he blessed that day and made it holy (Genesis 2:2-3). Notice what he was not doing. He was not recovering. Omnipotence does not get tired. He stopped because the work was finished and good, and he wanted to enjoy the goodness rather than add to it. 

Notice also what got sanctified. The first thing in all of Scripture that God calls holy is not a mountain, a temple, or an altar. It is a day. Holiness enters the world as time set apart, not as real estate.

And when the command arrives at Sinai, it is anchored in that very habit: remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy, because in six days the Lord made everything and rested on the seventh (Exodus 20:8-11). The reasoning is not "you are exhausted, take a break." The reasoning is "your God stopped, so you may stop too." We rest in imitation, not merely in recovery.

Why it is such a serious command

I used to file Sabbath under wellness advice. Scripture files it under the Ten Commandments, alongside do not murder and do not steal. In Exodus 31:14-15, the penalty for profaning it is death, and it is named a sign between God and his people forever. That is not the vocabulary of a lifestyle tip.

Why so severe? Deuteronomy 5:15 supplies the reason that undid me. Keep this day, Israel is told, because you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord brought you out. A slave cannot say no to work. A slave has no standing to stop. So the Sabbath is the weekly proof that you are no longer owned — and refusing it is quietly volunteering for the old yoke. Egypt is a mindset before it is a place, and Pharaoh's economy has no seventh day.

Rest is trust with its hands open

Here is where Sabbath stops being restful and starts being uncomfortable, at least for people wired like me. God trained Israel in this with bread. Six mornings the manna came; on the sixth they gathered double, and on the seventh there was none to gather and none needed (Exodus 16:22-30). Hoarding it early only bred worms. The lesson took a generation, and it is still the hardest one on my list: provision does not depend on my hustle.

He scaled the same lesson up to the land itself — a sabbath year with no sowing and no reaping, and a promise to supply the harvest anyway (Leviticus 25:3-5, 20-22). An entire agricultural economy was asked to take its hands off the controls for twelve months.

That is what makes Sabbath a serious command rather than a soft one. Stopping is an act of trust, and trust requires letting go. Every hour I refuse to stop is an hour I am insisting the outcome rests on me. The psalmist says it plainly: rising early and staying up late, anxiously working for bread, is wasted effort, for God gives rest to those he loves (Psalm 127:2). Beloved is the word. Not productive. Beloved.

REST

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. God looked over his work and saw that it was good (Genesis 1:31) before he ever rested from it. Look back before you charge ahead. Unexamined activity is only motion.

E — Enjoy. He blessed the day and set it apart (Genesis 2:3), and Isaiah tells us to call the Sabbath a delight (Isaiah 58:13-14). 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, not to answer a few quick emails. To stop — and in the stopping, to be still and know that he is God (Psalm 46:10).

T — Trust. No manna on the seventh day, and none needed. The work will hold without you for a day, and 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 and 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.

Thoughts for a grace-filled day! 

Dr. Sam Kurien

Qara: Called Before You Are Commissioned

Lord, tune my heart and mind to hear you speak. Let my heartbeat beat with yours.

The other night I sat down with my kids, and we did a word study. It came out of a video we had watched together, and the word was qara — the Hebrew verb translated as "called" in 1 Samuel 3. I expected a ten-minute detour. We were still talking an hour later, because once you see what that word is doing, you start seeing it everywhere, and you cannot unsee what English has been quietly hiding from you.

Here is the problem. In English, "calling" does double duty. We ask a young person what they feel called to, and we mean: what job. We say a man found his calling, and we mean he/she found the work that fits him/her. English collapses calling into doing. Hebrew refuses to do that. Hebrew keeps two separate words, and the distance between them is where most of our anxiety about vocation lives.

Qara is naming, not tasking

Go back to the very first chapter of the Bible. God speaks creation into being with amar —, "and God said, let there be light" (Genesis 1:3). But the moment the light exists, a different verb shows up: God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night (Genesis 1:5). That is qara. It is not the verb of production. It is the verb of naming — of assigning identity, of saying what a thing is and who it belongs to.

Then watch God hand that same verb to a human being. In Genesis 2:19–20, Adam calls the animals by name. The first delegated act of God's image-bearer is the act God had just performed over the cosmos. To be called and to be named are one motion in Hebrew.

Which is why the word cuts both ways. When Eli's daughter-in-law hears that the ark is captured and her husband is dead, she names her newborn Ichabod — "the glory has departed from Israel" (1 Samuel 4:21–22)—same verb. To name is to declare what is true of someone. And it is why Isaiah 43:1 lands with the force it does: I have called you by name; you are mine. Identity given before anything at all is asked.

Samuel: called four times before he was told anything

Now read 1 Samuel 3 slowly. Samuel is a child, lying down in the temple of the LORD where the ark of God was, while Eli sleeps in his own place. The LORD calls him — and the text tells us plainly that Samuel did not yet know the LORD, and the word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to him (v. 7).

Three times God calls the name and nothing else. No message. No instruction. No task. Three times the boy runs to the wrong man. It takes Eli until the third round to perceive who is actually speaking and to teach the child how to answer. Only then, on the fourth, does the LORD come and stand there and call as before: "Samuel! Samuel!" (v. 10).

That doubled name is covenant language. Abraham on the mountain (Genesis 22:11). Jacob at Beersheba (Genesis 46:2). Moses at the bush (Exodus 3:4). Presence and name first. The message — a hard word about Eli's house — does not arrive until verse 11. And Samuel is not recognized as a prophet by all Israel until verses 19–21, after years of proving faithful.

God's calling precedes our assignment. That is the whole pattern in one sentence, and Scripture repeats it so consistently that I now think it is the design and not the exception.

The other word: shalach

The sending verb is shalach — to send, to dispatch, to commission. It is the word at the bush: "Come now, I will send you to Pharaoh" (Exodus 3:10). It is Isaiah's answer in the throne room: "Here am I, send me" (Isaiah 6:8). It is Joseph looking back over twenty-two years of pit, slavery and prison and telling his brothers that God sent him ahead of them to preserve life (Genesis 45:5).

Two verbs. Qara, you are named and summoned. Shalach, you are sent to do a thing. The Greek keeps the same architecture — kaleō, to call and to name, and apostellō, to send out with commission; the word our "apostle" comes from: two testaments, two languages, one structure. Only English flattens it.

The gap is the point

Abraham. Genesis 12:1 is not even a sending — it is lek-leka, "go, for yourself." He is not deployed; he is summoned to walk. What follows the summons is not a task list but a promise he cannot possibly execute himself. He is seventy-five when he leaves (Genesis 12:4) and one hundred when Isaac is born (Genesis 21:5). Twenty-five years between the call and the promise taking flesh.

Moses. His looks simultaneous — call and assignment in the same conversation at the bush. But Acts 7:23–25 tells us that at forty Moses had already decided what the assignment was, took it up on his own authority, killed a man, and got it catastrophically wrong. Forty years of sheep later, God calls him by name. The call still preceded. Moses had tried to run the assignment first, which is exactly what we all do.

David. Samuel anoints him in 1 Samuel 16, and he goes straight back to the sheep, then to part-time work as a musician for a mentally tormented king. The assignment did not arrive fast. It took caves, a fugitive's decade, and feigning madness before a Philistine king (1 Samuel 21:13). He is thirty when he becomes king over Judah, and seven and a half years pass before he reigns over all Israel (2 Samuel 5:4–5).

Paul. Called on the Damascus road (Acts 9:3–6), named a chosen instrument (Acts 9:15) — and then he tells us himself that he did not immediately consult anyone, but went to Arabia, and only after three years went up to Jerusalem (Galatians 1:15–18). The formal sending comes later still, when the Holy Spirit says to the church at Antioch: set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them (Acts 13:2). Notice that the sending refers back to a calling that was already old news.

The Presence Framework

This is the diagram I had in my journals: a revelation from the Lord a few years ago. I took a pic and tried to animate it, but the export below is a static PNG; somehow the video didn't download well. 

The outer ring is Presence, and it encircles everything — because after the call, the good the Father intends is that we know He is with us. He does not send us out ahead and wait for a report. He goes with us, and He goes through the assignment with us, whatever shape that assignment takes. Presence is not a reward for finishing the work. It is the environment in which the work happens.

There will be detours, backlogs, and long stretches of discouragement. What makes us fruitful, I suspect, is not how quickly we clear those — it is how we lean in while we are still in them: into the promises, into the intimacy, into obedience. Leaning away from the Spirit in those seasons is where the damage begins, and Scripture is honest that it rarely stops with us. It runs down the line.

Inside that ring sit the circumstances — good, bad, and mundane — and the threats, also good and bad. Both are real. Neither is outside the ring.

Then Promises, at the top, because that is where God starts. Our dreams and our desires feed upward into the promises rather than downward into the work — they get tested and reshaped against what God has actually said. From the promises, the heavy arrow drops into Calling and Purpose. That arrow is one-directional on purpose. Calling descends; it is not assembled from below.

At the base sit purposes, goals, and jobs, and the arrows there run both ways, because goals change. They should change. A goal that dies is not a calling that failed. The role ends, the org chart is redrawn, the venture closes, the season turns — and the calling is untouched, because it was never the job in the first place.

Running under the whole thing: the Holy Spirit reveals our direction that connects. Revelation from the Lord is what joins the top of the diagram to the bottom. Without it, we are left guessing at our own significance from our résumé.

Why does this matter on a Sunday?

In my personal journal, one question comes to mind as I sit and reflect: How does this connect with me today? What do the next seasons of assignments look like?  I don't know what all they are, but I do know this as a person secure in Calling - I know mine is being the beloved and being one called to "Lead' so then it doesn't matter in certain or uncertain assignments, change or mundane; my job is to desperately hold on to Jesus. 

If calling and assignment are the same thing, then a lost job is a lost identity, a delayed promise is a divine failure, and a long stretch of obscurity means you misheard. All three of those conclusions are false, and all three of them are common among faithful people I know.

Whether the assignment arrives three seconds or thirty years after the call — David's cave, Abraham's twenty-five years, Moses' forty years of sheep, Paul's Arabia — the calling was never contingent on the arrival. Grace and glory differ very little, Thomas Brooks said: the one is the seed, the other the flower.

The same holds here. You are called by name first. Sending is downstream of belonging, never its basis.

Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.

I encourage myself with these two other promises the Lord has given me as reminders: one of them is my life verse from Joshua 1:6-9, and the other one from Jeremiah 29:11-13