I've been on a defining road for the past year. A road of change.
Doing a semester in Costa Rica, sharing a home in Mount Vernon with a wonderful couple and now sharing a home in Nashville have all created both safe and challenging environments.
It has been a road of recovery.
A road mostly full of excitement and life and contentment and wonder about the future.
More recently, however, that wonder has grown into worry, the contentment into discontent and the excitement into distaste.
I am, as Ruth Haley Barton says, "dangerously tired." I am in dire need of a sabbath rest--a sabbath rhythm in my week. I never thought husband-ing, bread winning, soul searching, rhythm keeping, trying-to-stay-content-ing would be so exhausting. There has been pressure..more than I've been prepared to handle on my own.
And so I'm coming to this place on the road where the sun has been set for far too long, the dryness in the land is way too...dry.
Physically, emotionally, relationally: drained, exhausted, worn out, emptied.
Withered.
The road ahead though, with promise of a true REST through the Sabbath seems very different than its been recently.
Its a bit scary to begin entering into this new rhythm of sabbath keeping. Its kind of frightening to really step back for one day in my week, and in my core believe, that my world isn't going to fall apart without me actively participating in it... To honestly hold in my core that God has been taking care me, and therefore can now also, take care of me. To trust that while I rest, things really will be okay. To live in a posture of respect of a God who would create something so beautiful as a time of rest. So it will be hard I think.
But how desperate I am for rest, for replenishment.
"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." -matt 11:28
So may you begin to think about the Sabbath in your own life.
May you begin to wrestle with trusting Jesus more fully in the pressures of your day.
May the road ahead, for you, be very, very different.
1 year ago
