Rest - Part 6 - Rest is a Gift

"You have made us for Yourself O Lord, and our hearts are restless until we rest in You"
-Augustine

Rest is a gift.

Which of course seems like a good thing...

...after all, who doesn't like gifts?


If something's a gift, than all I have to do is accept it. What could be hard about that?

But some gifts are difficult to accept, and in this case it probably has to do with our illusions of self sufficiency, and our achievement oriented culture.

Accepting a gift can mean that others can provide for me things that I can not or have not provided for myself. It opens me to needing other people. It exposes my finiteness and my personal limits...my dependency on others.

Which, as I have acknowledged here before, my ego does not particularly like.

Now considering rest as a gift to be accepted from God brings me into these same conflicts with wanting to preserve the illusion of self-sufficiency.

I am forced to acknowledge that I am not the source of all things in my life.

The source of true rest is God....and...it is a rest I cannot provide for myself, no matter how clever or knowledgeable I become about the topic. As Augustine points out in the quote that begins this post, all other rest will be insufficient until I find my true rest in God.

In this quest to find rest, I'm becoming increasingly aware that I cannot strive too hard to find it, or else it becomes...another exhausting activity.

It might seem stupid, but I think lots of us actually would prefer the exhausting pursuit of rest to accepting it as a gift, not just because of our claims to self-sufficiency, but also because we are so habitually formed to achieve everything for ourselves.

North American culture is a cult of personal achievement.

We've come to define ourselves in terms of our "profiles" (facebook, linked in, twitter, even our resumes). And if you've escaped the incredibly dangerous thinking about "personal branding", consider yourself lucky, and sane. But it's not just what you've accomplished that defines us in this culture, it's also who you should become. Our media is saturated with content that suggests all sorts of ways you can improve yourself. If you just follow the right steps, the right program, if you just had the right information....you can fix anything you don't like about yourself...at least, that's what they tell us.

So learning to accept rest stands squarely in contradiction to the prevailing ethos of our culture, where everything gets sucked into the vortex of our personal achievements, even to the point of attempting to re-create who we are.

But the gift of rest says: "you are not able to do all things for yourself, you must come in dependence on a higher power to receive this restoration from all of your other frantic efforts".

Acceptance, not achievement.

Dependency, not self-sufficiency.

Gift, not possession.

These are ideas we intellectually ascent to, but because of our embeddedness in our culture they are much more difficult to embrace and live out.

But accepting the gift of rest is therefore something with the potential to transform us beyond just the experience of being restored, but also in re-aligning us into our proper relationship to God and creation.

When we receive the gift, we are forced to move back into role of dependency on God, and out of the slavery of self-sufficiency and achievement.

And perhaps this is the wisdom of Augustine's opening quote - that we cannot find rest until we find rest in God, because any rest outside of God allows us to stay in our self-sufficiency, and the restlessness it creates.