August 5, 2017

I am technically resting, sitting in a comfortable chair, wondering what it really means to rest. It is Saturday, which always reminds me that there is a seventh day of the week, at least on the calendar we use. And on the seventh day of creation God rested. He looked at all his work and was satisfied, and then he rested, or stopped working. He didn’t stop because it was the seventh day. He stopped because he was done with a project. Resting is fun when you are done with a project, but what if you don’t feel done?

Of course, I am not God. I need to rest for other reasons like being tired and needing to refresh and recharge. I’m enough “in God’s image” to wish that I could look at my work and pronounce it good, finished to a satisfactory point, so I could rest. But I’m more like my human composition – I have to be commanded (kindly) to not work myself to death.

To rest must also have a deeper meaning than to do something that I consider fun. I pepper my time every day with fun. I knit, I do solitaire challenges, I sit and read, I ride my bike, I watch TV. I have a lot of fun, restful activity. In all of it my mind is engaged in something other than work. But none of that requires me to engage with God or my own mortality. What does that is aging. The longer I survive, the easier it becomes to think about God and what his plans might be.

I become more interested in looking back, trying to see a pattern, a progression. I become more interested in the clues in my environment that inform me of how God works. I become more impressed that he actually has a written word of instruction – one that has surpassed the effects that any of its scribes could have imagined.

This week we had a storm. It wasn’t a particularly bad one, but it cleaned a lot of dead wood out of the trees. I suppose that is God’s purpose in a storm, whether it be in the woods or in my life. Today, as I rest, I’m going to think about how it is that things become new, with dead stuff removed, and appearances changed.