The blessing of rest

From cover of Return to Your Rest: new growth on a tree, with slender green leaves

For a long time now, God has continued to bring me back to the subject of rest. Gently but firmly, he has shown me so, so much. Patiently, he is teaching me to come to him again and again. He is offering me real rest, even when it seems most impossible.

Thing is, I desperately needed this help long before I knew I needed it.

Real rest is so different from what I had thought. It’s so much more expansive, and desirable, and enjoyable. And it’s so very vital.

I had no clue how rest-deprived I was.

Well into midlife, I pursued the Christian life in the ways I had been taught to pursue it. I wanted to know the Lord. I asked him for many things. Rest was not one of them.

Then, in the big middle of seeking to follow God, I found myself utterly spent. Day after day, I stumbled under a heavy load. That was when I started praying for rest – praying fervently, I might add. But for a long time, I heard no answer, saw no relief.

Here’s a picture for us

Egypt never offered God’s people the rest their Lord wanted to give them. Yet, having moved there to survive a famine, the people were content to stay. They didn’t cry out to the Lord for deliverance until cruel taskmasters ruled them.

And then, when they did cry out, God didn’t answer for a long time.

Had he not heard? Did he not care?

Yes, he heard, and he loved them very much. Long before they cried to him, the Lord was preparing to lead them out from that place, and into a place of rest. At the right time, God sent Moses to them. And because of Moses’ intercession, God promised them:

My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest. (Ex. 33:14)

Yet, repeatedly, God’s people kept trying to stay in, and to go back to, the place of utter exhaustion and crushing loads. If the Lord had tried to lead them out earlier, I wonder if they would have followed him at all.

Even after all the miracles God worked in their behalf, that rest-less generation never did fully leave Egypt in their hearts. And they never did fully trust the God who carried them on eagles’ wings to bring them to himself (Ex. 19:4). Thus, they wandered in a barren desert for 40 years.

Ah, but the children who grew up in that wilderness let the Lord accomplish his purpose through it. And that generation embraced the blessing their parents refused: the blessing of rest.

Be eager to know this rest

Now, as then, entering rest requires earnest effort. It requires faith that presses in by grace.

Our Lord knows how very much in us, and around us, fights to keep us from it.

So Hebrews 3 and 4 point us back to that Exodus generation, and remind us how very much God’s people missed because they decided it was too costly, and too hard, to enter the rest their Lord had promised them.

The same chapters announce:

Because of Jesus’ intercession, God has “a full and complete rest” for his people today.

Let us then be eager [be diligent, make every effort] to know this rest for ourselves, and let us beware that no one misses it through falling into the same kind of unbelief as those we have mentioned. (Heb. 4:9, 11 Phillips)

Our Lord knows when we’re not asking for rest, because we think it’s unattainable, or we think it’s counterproductive, or we have no clue that we need it.

He knows when we’re crying out for rest, but only willing to accept it on our terms.

Jesus knows better than anyone: Rest doesn’t come easy or cheap. Yet to miss it is disastrous. So he calls to us, inviting us. He cries out to warn us. Always, he leaves the choice to us.

And he aches for us to find our rest in him.

No rest for the weary

I’ve been in a place where rest seemed impossible. I lived there for quite a while.

I’ve been in a place where rest was deemed unprofitable, a huge waste of time and a hindrance to getting all the important stuff done.

I’ve been in a place where rest was so absent for so long, few people missed it, and fewer still would have known it if they saw it. That place, I lived most of my life.

In my church world

I began to recognize how badly I needed rest when I worked within the Southern Baptist Convention. From the start, the nonstop demands and demeaning treatment exhausted me. Then, abuse pummeled me.

During those years, I began to hear Jesus’ calling:

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. (Matt. 11:28)

I began to seek earnestly to know, “How do I do that, Lord?” and “How in the world does it look?”

In the end, those utterly depleting years in the SBC structure exposed so much more than that one denomination.

Leaving there, and at last beginning to learn real rest, I began to see how very much in our American church world actively opposes it – how very often we practice a “Christianity” that wears us out and weighs us down with impossible loads. I began to realize:

What names Jesus’ name may utterly block his people from coming to him and finding rest.

In my Christian home

Most distressing of all, I began to see how profoundly my life had lacked rest all along. I began to see why.

Utterly unawares, I had lived with exploitation and rejection, first from my parents, then from my husband, and subsequently from others I trusted too. From infancy through most of the years behind the façade in the SBC, exploitation was the more prominent tactic.

As one observant woman told me, “A lot of people use you.” When she said it, I still didn’t see it. But oh my, was it true!

From the moment I chose to submit to God, rather than the SBC, rejection came roaring to the fore. It came first from my church world, then from Christians whom I counted close friends – and from my Christian home.

Ah, but rejection did not openly throw me out on my ear.

By and large, the rejection I’ve faced works covertly and relentlessly. It pushes you away, while holding you emotionally hostage, and somehow making the shunning your problem, or your imagination, or your fault. It toys with you, offering you hope that you might yet be accepted, while it works to isolate and shame and destroy.

In the big middle of seeing all that, and seeking by God’s grace to survive it and to walk out through the midst of it, I kept hearing Jesus say, ever so gently, ever so firmly:

Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me – watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly. (Matt. 11:28-30 MSG)

Little by little, the Lord showed me what that meant and how it could look.

Day by day, his Spirit anchored me, breathing into my spirit the assurance: Rest is possible, and your Lord is faithful and true.

No matter how completely rest seems to have disappeared

During that time, I started writing an e-book titled, Return to Your Rest: A Spirit-to-spirit Journey. By the amazing grace of God, I finished a book on rest in the tumultuous year when I separated from, and then divorced, my husband.

That year, I finally acknowledged what I had not wanted to see: The man I had loved my entire adult life had disowned me the day I left the SBC. Even more devastating: He had groomed me from the moment he met me, and had used me from the day I said, “I do.”

A dozen years earlier, I’d sought with all my heart to go with God, through and out of the abuse in the SBC. Afterward, I was stunned to realize my husband was angry, but not with the people who had abused me. He was angry with me – for staying when I stayed, for leaving when I left; for utterly embarrassing him.

I was bewildered when he kept pressuring me to return to the denomination he had always told me he’d joined, and tolerated, only because “I want what’s best for you, Deborah.”

Again and again, I found myself explaining, “God has warned me not to go back into that abusive environment.” Again and again, he said he understood. He said he supported me. And he worked relentlessly, and so very subtly, to isolate and gaslight and sabotage me.

For years, I did not realize: He was abusing me. And he was using tactics I didn’t even know existed, to make the opposite seem true. In the words of Malachi 2:14 and other Scriptures, the husband of my youth dealt treacherously against me.

I was devastated when I finally saw how much of my life, and how many of my treasured relationships, he had shattered – while I had continued to trust him, and he had continued to play the part of the good guy I had always believed him to be.

With my heart broken, my physical health unraveling and every forward step with God opposed – I left the marriage, after years of trying to save it. I left when the Lord stunned me by telling me, “You cannot stay with him, and go with me.”

Three years later, God took me back to the book about rest that I had written in the middle of all that. And I saw: What he had shown me in Scripture, he had been sowing within me Spirit-to-spirit.

As I’ve come to Jesus in spite of all that has fought against it, I have found rest in him.

Still healing, still learning, still walking out of what purports to be godly but profoundly opposes rest, I updated the e-book, and published a print version too.

I can attest, dear one:

No matter how completely rest seems to have disappeared from your life, God knows where it is, and he makes the way for you to return.

Dear weary one

Today, I’m still learning to live from a place of rest – and still learning how to return, when real rest eludes me.

It’s not a “once and done” thing, you know. Nothing is, in this Christ life. We learn to rest – spirit, soul and body – as God works in us, and as we respond to him, moment by moment, day by day.

Today, too, I feel the ache of the Lord Jesus, for his groaning Body to know the blessing of rest. I’ve felt that ache every time the Spirit of God has embraced me and exhorted me …

Dear weary one, I cannot say too strongly: If what you’re getting isn’t rest, where you’re going isn’t to Jesus. Whatever relentlessly drives you to exhaustion is a cruel taskmaster, not the Lord Jesus Christ.

Dear battered one, I cannot testify too passionately: If you are being demeaned, dehumanized, isolated, exploited, manipulated, attacked or coerced, the source of it is not godly. The source of it is not God.

Dear overburdened one, I cannot stress too much: If you’re trying to carry what is not yours – feelings or responsibilities that belong to someone else, religious rules that humans made up, traumas and worries not yet cast on the Lord – and the more you struggle, the deeper you sink, Christ is not applauding your futile efforts. He’s crying, “Stop!”

Yes, stopping, breathing, resting, is possible. Our Lord himself makes the way.

Here’s the closing blessing from Return to Your Rest. It’s born from the scriptural premise that we can bless each other in the Lord. And it’s my heartcry for you.

Dear fellow traveler on life’s journey …

I bless you in the name of the One who loves you, who shepherds you, who provides abundantly for you, who helps you, who shows you great favor, who teaches you the unforced rhythms of grace.

When everything in life shouts otherwise, be blessed to remember: The Lord Jesus is gentle and humble in heart. His load is easy. His burden is light. And moment by moment, he invites you to come.

Whatever the Lord hasn’t assigned to you, he will lift off of you. Be blessed to let him.

Whatever he does assign to you on this Spirit-to-spirit journey, he will shoulder with you, and he will carry the bulk of the load. Blessed to cooperate with him.

Whenever you feel exhausted and overburdened, be blessed to refuse to stay in that place. Time and again, come to Jesus. Regardless what tries to force you from it, return to your rest.

Healing from toxic church – seeking what is precious, and truly God