An Invitation to Rest
Yesterday I met with my Spiritual Director and the topic of discussion was a sensed invitation to rest. This morning to continue my thoughts I played with iMindMap and came up with this graphic about the thoughts and ideas. Here are some words to give part of my reflection to the mind map.
There were a number of facets to this rest. One was to see self-care as a broader kind of rest. A rest of actually nurturing the body that God gave me by resting well, eating well and moving well. Just sitting still alone didn’t seem adequate for the kind of rest I was sensing my body needing. I have been watching what I eat and am trying to daily move my body in a relaxed yet sustained way. In the last 3 weeks I have managed to lose 10 pounds. That is a good thing, but the rest will not come so easily. I still have about 30-40 pounds I want to lose to get to a healthy weight. That way, my body can rest well as it lives (all that extra fat makes the heart work harder).
Another facet of rest is the idea of the holistic sabbath. This is broader than just taking a day a week for rest (which I still have as a challenge to do). I saw this as an invitation to see in my centering prayer and in giving God time for contemplative prayer and scripture reading a giving of sabbath to God in each day. So prayer does not become simply something I think I have to do each day, but it becomes a gift of space and time in my life every day to be intentional about God’s presence.
The other main image that came from the idea of Rest was the image of flow. The flow of water through a stream bed has been there for a few months for me. And until lately, the image has been one of the stream being blocked and dammed up. So my desire and frustration and struggle has been to find freedom for myself. And this struggle has been long-standing. Every few months I will rankle against the feeling of being bound by something and unable to be free to be myself or to do what I want to do. I am usually standing on the shore trying to figure out what the damming rocks are and how to get rid of them. And usually I never discovered the answer.
The facet of rest as Flow is to see that I have been the damming obstacle. I have placed my self-centeredness in the center of the flow of God’s love and grace in my life. I have wanted to control the power of the Spirit for my own ends and to match my own desires. Even my desire for freedom was cast in terms of what I wanted for myself. The invitation to rest is becoming for me an invitation to get my ego-self out of the way of the free flow of God’s will. To maintain the stream bed image, I need to let go of the felt need or desire to direct the flow in my direction and allow myself to experience the freedom that comes with following the current of what God is doing in and through my life. My own struggles and frustrations were not simply in response to the blockage to the Spirit, they were a big part of the obstacles themselves.
So the invitation to rest is the invitation to let go of frustration and struggle and surrender to God’s will. This surrender is my consent to being re-oriented in how I choose. The reality of life is that God is already at the center and I need to let go of my illusions that my will is the center of life. Therein lies the freedom, but not as the goal of my struggles, but as God’s response to my surrender.
I’m sure I will reflect more on this.
