I’m delighted to announce the second edition of Return to Your Rest. The e-book published in 2016 has been updated. Daniel van Straaten has designed a new cover (which I love) and a new print edition. Yes!

Not busyness alone

A new chapter, “The Unrest of My Story,” identifies enemies of rest I have faced, including:

anxiety,
busyness/overload,
rejection,
trauma,
abuse,
shame.

Other chapters deal with other enemies of rest. Some, we’re well aware of. Others, we may not have considered at all.

The chapter, “Sort of Like Frog Gigging,” focuses on a brutal enemy we might call religiosity.

And this excerpt names another one:

The enemy of rest is not busyness alone. According to Hebrews 3:18-19, a prime enemy of rest is unbelief.

This unbelief may surface when life triggers turmoil in our soul – and instead of acknowledging our feelings, desires and thoughts, and submitting them to God, we let our inner disquiet drive us. Undone, we take matters into our own hands.

Yet …

The absence of rest kills. It reduces our minds to mush. It opens our bodies to disease. It replaces vitality with stupor and a crazed, mechanical running to keep up.

May God give us courage to rise up in the face of all that fights against it, and grace to return to rest.

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Quotations are from Return to Your Rest: A Spirit-to-spirit Journey, © 2016, 2019 Deborah P. Brunt.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Overcoming the enemies of rest

Some of my other blog posts also focus on overcoming the enemies of rest. For example:

• Anxiety. When I worry, God doesn’t shame me
• Rejection. Mary Magdalene stuck her neck out
• Trauma. When waiting is writhing
• Abuse. Illusionists! The abusers we have not seen
• Shame. Can we talk about shame?
• Religiosity. Sort of like frog gigging: How religion kills rest
• Unbelief. Time out
• All the above. The blessing of rest