Rest - Part 7 - The Paradox of Rest

So my last post appears to have created a contradiction.

On one hand I've discovered that rest takes work (see this post for details)

But now I've also discovered that rest is a gift (see this post for details)

I've said that rest isn't something we can achieve, but I've also said you have to work at it, and part of our difficulty is often that we expect rest to be an entirely passive thing that will happen automatically if we just stop doing.

Perhaps it's not so much a contradiction, as it is a paradox.

Remember, a paradox is something that appears to contradict itself, but captures the reality that two different propositions can be true at the same time.

So one way of thinking about this paradox is that while rest is a gift, it is a gift we have to work at accepting.

We assume that accepting gifts is passive; requiring no effort from us at all. But this might not quite be true. Most gifts require some kind of action. You have to show up at the party. You have to accept it from the giver. May you have to unwrap it. And certainly accepting a gift often means using the gift in some capacity.

This might be simple if the gift is socks, or the always classy Christmas tie (you know the ones with little LED lights that light up, or maybe even play Joy to the World)

But what if the gift is love, or authenticity, or vulnerability, or forgiveness, or even...

....rest.

Maybe in the case of gifts like rest our acceptance is not the passive, "allowing things just to happen" kind of posture, but requires a type of work on our part.

And maybe that work involves overcoming the kinds of conditions of the heart I talked about in the last post: self-sufficiency and the cult of personal achievement. Perhaps the hard work of allowing ourselves to depend on God rather than our personal efforts is a bit of pre-condition to being able to fully experience the gift.

Maybe in our daily lives the work of rest involves saying "no" to a whole bunch of things so that we have space in our schedules, our minds, and our hearts to say "yes" to the gift of rest. Saying "no" is often hard work - it exposes us to a host of anxieties. We worry about letting others down. We worry about how our "no" will appear to others. We even struggle with how saying "no" doesn't fit with the image we have of ourselves as a certain kind of person.

If only it were easier to know what we should say "no" to and what we should say "yes" to.

But we don't. We simply can't see the future, so most of us err on the side of saying "yes" to too many things, and end up struggling to be able to receive rest.

So rest is a paradox.

We work hard to accept it as a gift.

And maybe some of us have more work to do in our hearts and minds and routines before we really can receive it as a gift.