Discover Rest for the Weary

Not so very long ago, church would have had little competition for your time on Sunday morning. Oh sure, there was the perennial pull of sleeping late and saying that you attended Mattress Methodist, Box Springs Baptist, Pillow Presbyterian, or the Church of the Holy Comforter. But other than sleeping in on Sunday, there wasn’t much else to do. No stores open on Sunday morning. No sporting events taking place. Nothing. 

Sunday mornings were reserved for church. Perhaps it wasn’t that way everywhere, but in the Deep South where I grew up, Sunday was church day. However, my own daughter is not growing up in that same dominantly church-focused culture. Lots of other activities and interests now vie for our attention. And if we don’t have a soccer match, tee time, or some other distraction demanding our Sunday morning, then the very over-busyness of our lives makes it all the easier to give in the temptation to sleep late. In the span of one generation, the assumption that we would be in church, at least during this time every week, has disappeared. And yet our bodies have not changed, we still need rest.

An article at WebMD notes some of our nation’s workaholic stereotypes including, “The techie who works 12 hours a day at a dot-com start-up. The lawyer who sweats every last detail of every last contract. The store owner who hasn’t taken a vacation in ten years. The doctor who spends every free moment in the lab. The stockholder whose heart rate fluctuates with the Nasdaq.”

The article goes onto say that working more is not better and workaholics cost an estimated $150 billion per year through health-related problems. This is not a problem in our nation alone. In Japan they have coined a term “Karoshi,” meaning death from overwork. The 60-70 hour work weeks in Japan cause 10,000 workers a year to die on the job from Karoshi. Overwork is also listed by an association of matrimonial lawyers as one of the top four causes of divorce.

While “workaholic” is not an official psychological term, Dianne Fassel, the author of some work related studies, says that “a workaholic will die faster than an alcoholic any day.”

This would have happened even faster in ancient Israel as Exodus 31:15 states, “Whoever does work on the Sabbath day shall be put to death.” Being a workaholic was a capital crime in ancient Israel. There weren't loopholes either. The day of rest was for you and your servants and the alien living in the land.

Why would that be? What’s so bad about work? Hard work may be a virtue, but God wants us to know that there is more to life than work. Your body needs rest. That’s why sometimes recreation doesn’t count as rest.

A couple of weekends ago as my wife and daughter and I sat in traffic behind a couple of different wrecks, we were often alongside the three 250-horsepower motors dangling off the back of “The Exterminator.”

I thought of my great-grandmother, “Mama Logue,” who fished with a cane pole in the cow pond of her Edgefield County, South Carolina farm. There is such a radical difference between the way she fished and menacing lines of the high performance fishing boat we saw making its way down I-95.

Now I often known enough to know what I don't know (don't try that five times fast) and in this case I know I don't know anything about the world of professional tournament fishing. The Exterminator is a fishing boat sponsored by a pest control company and in its world of tournament fishing the 750 horses pushing the boat may not only common, but needed. And yet I couldn't escape the fact that we drove more than 17 hours to spend Friday evening and all day Saturday hanging out with old friends. And we have also vacationed so hard that we came home needing a vacation from our vacation.

God knows we need rest and not just the exhausting kind of recreation. Rather we crave the re-creation that comes from letter your body idle and your mind wander. So our bodies need us to balance the get-to-the-fish-faster sort of recreation exemplified by The Exterminator, with some real down time.

In the 4th century many hermits lived in the desert of Egypt trying to draw closer to God through a life of prayer and study. It was the beginnings of what would become monasteries. We have many of their stories preserved. Here is one on work,

“Once Abbot Anthony was conversing with some brethren, and a hunter who was after game in the wilderness came upon them. He saw Abbot Anthony and the brothers enjoying themselves, and disapproved. Abbot Anthony said: ‘Put an arrow in your bow and shoot it.’ This he did.

‘Now shoot another,’ said the elder. ‘And another, and another.’ The hunter said, ‘If I bend my bow all the time it will break.’ Abbot Anthony replied: ‘So it is also in the work of God. If we push ourselves beyond measure, the brethren will soon collapse. It is right, therefore, from time to time, to relax their efforts.’”

            So take it easy with some real rest. If you feel guilty about resting remind yourself that the God who made you wired your system so that you have to rest. But when you are sitting with your feet up this weekend telling your spouse that the preacher said you gotta kick back, remember that you need to make room for your spouse to rest too.

            (The Rev. Frank Logue is pastor of King of Peace Episcopal Church in Kingsland.)
 

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