All Creation Rests

Mankind is the only one of God's creation who thinks Sabbath is not necessary

One of my favorite places in my house is the kitchen sink.

Now, I will be the first to tell you that I’m a weirdo and love doing dishes. But that’s not why I love my kitchen sink so much.

While I stand there, rinsing dish after dish, I look out of the window just above the sink and watch the neighbor’s sheep grazing.

Little lambs hopping all around, driving their mama sheep crazy (and yes, the mama sheep bump their babies as if to say, “Give your mama a rest already!” I totally relate to mama sheep.)

On a rare occasion, I’ll look out to see them lying down, chewing the cud.

Sheep do not chew the cud while walking about. They need to lie down and be still in order to bring up their food and digest it.

The idea of rest is woven throughout all of God’s creation.

• Night and day.

• Sun, moon, and stars.

• Tides that move in and out.

• Summer and spring, winter and fall.

• Plants have seasons of growth, fruitfulness, and dormancy.

• Animals eat, move, and rest.

God even instructed His people to give the ground a rest from planting, to replenish the nutrients in the soil.

Rest is built into the nature of everything around us.

And yet, we are bombarded with the message of:

“You’ll sleep when you’re dead.”

“Hustle harder.”

“Work more jobs.”

A normal workweek used to be 40 hours, but now 40 hours is considered slacking off.

We used to rise with the sun and retire with the moon, but now we have electricity that allows us to extend our day longer than God intended.

Is it any wonder that hearts give out, bodies crash, and fatigue has become something most people admit to struggling with?

I was one of these.

My doctor diagnosed me with chronic fatigue in 2005. She looked me straight in the eye, seriousness etched on her face so clearly that I can still see it in my mind’s eye now, nearly 11 years later, and said, “You have chronic fatigue. You need to rest. It is time to let go of some things and rest.”

My interpretation? “You’re lazy.”

This stemmed from my own judgmentalism of everyone diagnosed with a chronic disease.

I didn’t understand them, so I labeled them as lazy.

It took only 4 years to drive myself from chronic fatigue to adrenal fatigue.

I could say that adrenal fatigue robbed me of so much, but the adrenal fatigue was only a consequence of my own pride.

Thinking I didn’t need to rest.

Sleep was a waste of time.

It would take several years to relearn the importance of rest. Not just sleep, but rest.

• Rest in my soul.

• Rest in my mind.

• Rest in my emotions

• Rest in my spirit.

• Rest in my body.

Rest is healing. Rest is restoring. Rest is replenishing. Rest brings life. Rest brings health. Rest brings strength.

All of nature declares God’s gift of rest.

Maybe one avenue of submitting to God is submitting to His command to rest.