“Come away with me by yourselves to a quiet place
and get some rest.”
(Mark 6:31)
I have been thinking a lot about rest lately. When I had to leave pastoral ministry last summer for health reasons I entered into a time of rest (I call it a “season” because that helps me think that it won’t last forever). At first I thought this was primarily for physical rest. My body was completely exhausted and needed a break. It’s been a year and I have had plenty of physical rest yet there is still an exhaustion that plagues me. I am beginning to see that “rest” means much more than simply the ceasing of activity. I am in a “season” of rest but I am finding that I need to do much more than rest physically.
Ceasing from activity is a necessary first step in the rest that Jesus calls us to but it must go much deeper. I think the kind of rest that Jesus is talking about is closely associated with the word ‘wholeness’. Wholeness implies a kind of rest that goes much deeper than our physical need. It goes all the way down to our soul and spirit. This is the place where our truest self resides. It’s also the place where brokenness lives. It’s hard to really be at rest when we are broken in those deep places. When we are broken we are fractured, divided in a sense. Think of a compound fracture in your arm. It is ‘divided’ from itself, in a way, and needs to come back together in order to heal. As long as it is divided from itself it is not well or whole. Parker Palmer in an excellent book called, ‘A Hidden Wholeness’, says that life is a journey toward living an undivided life. In essence, a whole life. Brokenness creates a kind of division within us. Things are not quite right. They are out of sync. Brokenness creates disorder in the soul and it’s hard to be at rest in the presence of disorder.
That’s why we can cease from our outward activity and still not enter into a place of true rest. Ceasing is the doorway to true rest, and it certainly does provide a measure of rest, but we must walk through this doorway in order to get to the deeper places of rest that Jesus calls us to. We must rest from our activities, but once there we must learn to rest from other things as well.
We need to learn how to rest from our false sense of identity. It’s exhausting on the soul to try and be someone that we are not. And it’s impossible to truly discover and embrace our true self apart from that quiet place of reflection when the voice of our soul and the voice of the Holy Spirit come together and speak the truth to us. Most of us have numerous “false selves” that we don’t even know are false. Brennan Manning calls these “imposters”. If we live with these imposters for long we begin to treat them as real and this creates a divided soul and a divided soul is not a soul at rest.
We also need to rest from attitudes and thought patterns that deplete the soul rather than fill it. The soul that has been surrendered to Jesus will be ill-at-ease with certain attitudes that are contrary to the Spirit of Jesus in us. For instance, anger and bitterness will deplete the soul rather quickly. So will things like jealousy, lust, and envy. We need to learn how to rest from (cease) these in order to enter into the rest of Jesus.
Sometimes we need to rest from our pursuits. Some of our pursuits are good and noble: learning and knowledge; exercise; hobbies; service and ministry. But even these require a certain level of striving and sometimes we need to rest from our striving (maybe only for awhile) in order to re-engage them with energy and passion. Other pursuits are less than holy and noble. Busyness, obsessions, harmful habits. Sometimes we are not even aware of what these are until we enter into that quiet place and let our soul and the Holy Spirit speak to us.
When Jesus calls us to come away with Him to a quiet place in order to get some rest ceasing our activities is only the beginning. Having removed ourselves from the frantic busyness and relentless distractions of our lives we can then listen to the voice of our soul that stands in desperate longing for a deeper awareness of the presence of Jesus. Only then can deep rest come, rest, not just of body, but of soul. That is the cry of the psalmist who says, “Find rest, O my soul, in God alone.” (Psalm 62:1)
