Get Some Rest: How Limits Bring a Spacious LifeSample

The Practice of Rest

Sleeping replenishes more than our physical bodies: sleep declares our trust in God. 

The very real practical step toward embracing a more spacious life is to recognize that we are human: bodies, souls, minds, with natural limits. You might need nine hours of sleep and hate Brussels sprouts. You may have an autoimmune disease, which limits your energy and what you can do. You may be tall or short, large or small, extroverted or introverted, with a shade of skin unlike your neighbor’s. If the second person of the Trinity took on flesh, then all your particularities matter. 

Jesus invites us to see our bodies as good, the material world as part of God’s kingdom. If the gates of hell cannot prevail against God’s kingdom, our limits are not barriers that God cannot work through. Our limits, rather, invite us into a proper relationship with God. 

When we recognize the limits of our body, we call what God made good. 

The fruit of hustle and hurry drains us of energy, compassion, mission, and peace. The magazines and self-help books tell us this is the good life, but the kingdom of God says otherwise. The kingdom of God is a net, a pearl of great price. It is yeast, a hidden treasure, small as a mustard seed. These are small, limited things created to do something—to feed, to create beauty, to transform ordinary elements into what they are supposed to be. To get this spacious life in us, we start by reckoning with our own designed smallness and thanking God for it. 

We need sleep. We are human. We have limits to what we can accomplish, and when we choose to sleep instead of working harder, we place our worth not in being productive machines but in being children of God. 

So take a nap. You are a child of the God who stills the wind and the waves from without and within.