Rest. It isn’t something I consciously think about that often. I usually get eight hours of sleep at night and wake up to my son’s rooster crowing as the sun bursts over the Andes Mountains. It’s much more peaceful than fighting with an alarm clock. Coupled with exercise in the great outdoors and access to fresh, healthy food grown on the farms all around, it’s easy to feel physically fit and well-rested.

But that’s just physical rest. Emotional and spiritual rest are often harder to come by, especially for moms of young children, many children, teens, or kids with special needs. Homeschooling ratchets things up another notch, and being a person who adds several self-imposed assignments to her schedule (why NOT invite the entire youth group over for homemade pizza?) certainly doesn’t help. Add cross-cultural ministry into this mix, and it’s easy to forget to plan time into your day for spiritual and emotional rest. Until God chooses to remind you, like He did for me when I spent our entire Christmas vacation sleeping off a particularly nasty flu bug. 

So as I lay in bed recovering from the flu while the kids did... (Hmmm… what exactly DID they do during their break?), I spent some time thinking about God’s desire to give us rest. He demonstrated our need for physical rest by taking an entire day off at the end of creation week. In Isaiah 30, He spoke of our need for spiritual and emotional rest by linking it to our salvation. The only thing we can do to obtain salvation is to repent… and then He calls us to rest. 

To rest in the fact that His forgiveness is enough. I won’t have a more complete salvation by doing bigger and better things for Him. I can’t raise absolutely perfect children. It’s OK to let the revolving door on our guest room stay shut for a while, or to start a school week with no written lesson plans. 

The Lord longs to be gracious to us, to rise up and show us compassion. I think that’s one reason why He reminds us to rest.