If there’s one thing they don’t teach you in graduate school, it’s how to rest.  Faculty, after all, have to be at least a teensy bit type-A just to survive the academic meritocracy–more than a teensy bit if you really want to succeed.  And we no doubt select for the same drivenness in our admissions processes.

Rest makes little sense in that framework, except as a grudging concession to weakness.  More and more, my body insists on the need for physical, emotional, and spiritual rest.  But it’s hard to let go.  I have the deeply ingrained habit of always bringing work with me anytime I think I might end up waiting somewhere with 10 minutes to kill: a book to read, a paper to grade, a lecture to write.  I need to feel like I’m catching up.  Somehow, if I put together enough 10-minute bites of productivity, everything will get done.  Everything on my mental (and sometimes physical!) list of things-to-do will be checked off, and I will be free.  Of course, that never happens.  All chronically busy people know how it goes.  For every item that gets checked off the list, two more take its place.

So, I sometimes rebel against the to-do list.  With the petulance of a two-year-old, I say “No!” and assert my independence.  I intentionally waste time, just because I can.  Unfortunately, however, rebellion isn’t rest.  It’s a sham kind of freedom, a fact I quickly realize when it’s time to get back to work.

Sure–to some extent, it’s a problem of time management.  But it’s not as if I don’t know how to do that.  The truth is deeper, more fundamental: the culture of busyness is itself a form of spiritual poison.  And Sabbath rest is the biblical antidote.

I’m fascinated by a passage from the book of Hebrews:

There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his.  Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will perish by following their example of disobedience (Heb 4:9-11, NIV).

In context, the author is demonstrating the superiority of Jesus over Moses.  Under Moses’ leadership, the people rebelled; their disobedience provoked God to angrily declare that the people would not enter the rest he had promised to them (ch. 3).  But those who are obedient to God today, through faith in Jesus Christ, are the ones who will at last enter the promised rest (4:3).

In this context, “rest” has an eschatological dimension, that is, a sense of reaching the fulfillment of a destiny.  I realize now that I’ve missed that element when I’ve thought about the Sabbath commandment in Exodus 20:11: “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day.  Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (NRSV).   I’ve tended to think of the seventh day as part of a larger rhythm of work and rest, something like a divine coffee break.  That makes sense with respect to our own lives, and even with respect to the rhythm of work and solitary prayer in the life of Jesus himself.

But in the creation story, God wasn’t taking a break from his work routine.  His work was “very good” (Gen 1:31)–which doesn’t mean God earned a B+ or an A-, but that everything he had created added up to one beautiful and harmonious whole, defining the very meaning of “good” itself.  And he had finished his work.  That’s why he rested; that’s why he blessed the day.  The work was done.  Everything was checked off the list.

And his list, I imagine, was a little longer than mine.

I don’t think we can rest in the same way or for the same reasons.  Even if our work pales in comparison to the creation of the universe, so does our ability to get it done.  That means we can’t justly earn a Sabbath–but we can receive it as a gift.  We don’t merit God’s rest, we enter into it by faith.  That’s the gracious invitation.  It’s the only way.

There’s an essential tension in the Christian life.  On the one hand, “we who have believed enter that rest” (Heb 4:3).  We already have access into the eschatological rest of God through faith in Jesus Christ.  On the other hand, we are told that we must “make every effort to enter that rest.”  We are expected to be obedient and faithful, striving to enter the rest that we supposedly have already entered.  But it’s like that with the biblical view of salvation and sanctification: we are saved, but we should stretch ourselves toward the day when our salvation will be complete; we are holy, but we should discipline ourselves every day to live in holiness.

So, in one sense, I agree with pastor Louis Evans when he says: “The rest of God is not cessation from activity, but a peace within the toil.”  This gets the spiritual sense right.  Again, there is an eschatological Rest that can’t be defined by activity level, by how much is written on our calendars.  We can get a taste of that Rest even now; we can enter spiritually into God’s Sabbath even when our work isn’t finished.

But I sincerely doubt that we can really know that kind of Rest unless we do in fact rest.  There is so much in our culture that militates against Sabbath that rest can feel like a sin against the system.   We become so defined by our productivity and sense of personal responsibility we even fear rest: it feels too much like slacking, or worse, that our very selves are falling apart.

The fact is that so much of our striving is tied to false definitions of who we are, of who we must be, that unless we cease that striving, we will remain deaf to what God says about us.  Or perhaps we can shift the metaphor: instead of ceasing our striving altogether, we should strive in the right direction.  We should strive to rest.  We should strive to set aside the lies the culture tells us about what gives us value.  We should strive to quiet the noise, so that we can make the time to be still in the presence of God.  And once there, we should strive to listen.

Merely taking a break isn’t enough to form the Sabbath within us.  But if we don’t at least stop the toil, regularly and intentionally, we won’t even give ourselves the chance to know peace within it.  The Rest is up to God.