The tomatoes in my garden do not know how to hurry, and in June, neither does much else. The light stretches long past supper. The lake settles into its deep summer green. Even the bell in our tower seems to ring a little slower this time of year, as if it has read the season’s memo.
I will tell you a secret about your rector: I am terrible at resting. I keep lists. I have been known to add things to a list that I have already done, just for the pleasure of crossing them off. Maybe you know the feeling. Somewhere along the way, many of us learned that rest is a reward, something we get to have once the work is finished. The trouble, of course, is that the work is never finished.
Scripture tells a different story. Sabbath, an old Hebrew word that simply means stopping, is not a prize at the bottom of the to-do list. It is a commandment, sitting right there among the famous ones about lying and stealing. God does not say rest once you have earned it. God says rest, because you are a beloved creature and not a machine. The stopping is the point.
One of my favorite scenes in the whole Bible is the prophet Elijah collapsing under a broom tree, burned out, spent, asking God to let it all be over. God’s answer is not a pep talk. It is a nap, and then warm bread, and then another nap. An angel touches his shoulder and says, get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you. No lecture. No performance review. Just food and sleep, twice, before anything else is asked of him. Dr. Webb is preaching on that very story this coming Sunday, and I plan to sit near the front and take notes.
What the lake knows
Our lake has been my teacher in all of this. It does not strive. It receives the rain when rain comes, holds the light when light comes, and keeps no ledger of either. Watch it long enough, from the shore or from a bench in the memorial garden we dedicated this spring, and something in your shoulders lets go. I have come to think this is why the psalmist reached for water when he wanted to describe how God treats us.
He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul.
Psalm 23
Notice the verbs. Makes me lie down. Leads me. Restores. The psalm never says improves my output or optimizes my summer. Rest, in God’s economy, is not something we produce. It is something we receive.
So here is my gentle invitation for these long weeks: let something go unfinished. Take the nap. Eat the slow supper on the porch. Put the phone in a drawer for an afternoon and watch the herons instead. And if it goes imperfectly, and it will, there is no guilt waiting for you here. Sabbath is not one more thing to be good at.
If you would like company in the stopping, the bell rings on Sunday mornings and the red doors are open at 10:00 for Holy Eucharist, the simple meal of bread and wine that Christians have shared for two thousand years. If getting dressed and driving anywhere sounds like one thing too many right now, the service streams online, and I promise the couch and the coffee cup count. And if rest keeps eluding you no matter how you chase it, please hear this: there is a place for you here, and you do not have to earn it. Nobody does. That is rather the whole idea.
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