The Medicine Cabinet: Go to Bed — Tuesday
Genesis 2:2
“By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.” (NIV)
Let me tell you about the only assignment I flat-out failed in college. I’m not saying that I was a straight-A student, but I was on an academic scholarship and had to work pretty hard to maintain my GPA so that I didn’t lose it—so grades mattered to me.
Before I tell you about this, you need to understand that I went to a Bible college to train for ministry. It was academically rigorous, but our professors cared about developing our character as much as our knowledge. That being said, sometimes assignments would look like memorizing large swaths of Scripture, or learning biblical languages, or writing 20-page papers… and sometimes, they looked like “Gospel Naps.” That’s right. I had a class with a professor that literally assigned me to take a 30-minute nap each week.
And I failed it.
The whole purpose of the assignment was to learn how to rest. But I always put it at the very bottom of my priority list because there were a million other things that seemed more important, so I never actually took the naps. In the end, failing to rest as assigned was, in fact, reflected in my GPA—but more importantly, it was reflected in my life. That semester was the first time I dealt with serious consequences in my physical, mental, and spiritual health because I refused to slow down. Resisting a rest didn’t make me more efficient or effective or impressive; it only left me in the shackles of busyness, exhaustion, and fatigue for longer.
A lot of us know that we’re tired. But for many of us, we’re so deep in the trenches of the things that wear us out that we actually push aside the one thing that would refresh us.
After God created the world, He rested.
Before Jesus calmed the storm, He rested.
So what on earth makes us think that we don’t need to?
If the sovereign Lord of creation prioritized rest… shouldn’t we also?
We take our cues from the order that God baked into the creation of the world—including the rhythm of rest, which He Himself modeled for us. More on that tomorrow.
Tuesday’s Reflection
Be honest—what are your feelings about how important rest actually is? What keeps you from finding rhythms of rest in your life? Is there something that you might have to say “no” to in order to prioritize rest?
