So it’s been a beautiful and bountiful year — but the clock keeps ticking, and the calendar keeps filling.
Even the work comes piling right back up every single day.
A year can feel so fast, and yourself going so slow, but there’s this extraordinary beauty in waking up to just be and slowing down to just see: to be fully attentive and deeply given to the life you’ve been graced with and the people you’ve been given to.
Isn’t life a gift?
And every moment a miracle?
To savour we need to slow.
We need to stop the perpetual treadmill of busyness and refute the notion that we’ve gotta keep up with the Joneses.
You and I — sometimes we do things not because we want to, but because we have to.
Sometimes we do life to the exclusion of intent, at the expense of calling.
Sometimes we let ourselves be caught right back up into the daily grind of life, preferring busyness to stillness and we forget to ask.
We forget to ask what it is that our soul most craves for, and what it is that will make us wonder in amazement and discern life’s direction with wisdom.
We keep running at neck-breaking speed to keep life rolling, and thinking we are in control, our boat gets rocked when things then happen. Detours and disappointments, distractions and discouragements, deaths and diseases —and we’re forced to stop short in our tracks.
We do our soul a major disservice when we believe that being ‘busy‘ equates to being ‘successful’, and ‘having it all’ and ‘doing it all’ right now and right away is the way to truly live and fully play.
Sometimes maybe what we want is an image?
An image of success?
But here midway through the year, we can make course corrections. We can choose to burn on rather than burn out.
The true rest for our soul-sabbath comes only when we choose to take our seat in Christ.
A seat where we know that we have arrived at the place of enough, a place where we are complete, a place of being seen even when we are hidden from the eyes of the world —because?
Coming to find your rest in God is the way to find your place in life.
In the age of Facebook and Google and Twitter, we can be so connected to everyone that we are truly disconnected from the One. We can rush for instant feeds and forget to feed with what truly satisfies.
But here in your seat, there is a place to step out of stress into a place of praise. And a time to freely play and feverishly pray.
Because to every one of us addicted to the rush and hurry, this is the bottom line:
Take your rest in Christ, and you’ll find your place in life.
Lose your peace in Christ, and you lose your presence in life.
Legacy is created by burning on — rushing only leads to burning out.
But we don’t have to burn out, we can burn on.
Because it’s never about how we perform, but everything with how He’s pardoned.
The way to savour deep is to dive slow, and believe in His goodness over every season of our life —-
And then taking your seat, you can claim your stake there, and dare yourself to stand.
So be quiet. Be at rest. To thrive you must not strive.
Instead, go, run with the kids. No! Let them run after you.
Let them hear you laugh out aloud so loud that you outlaugh the husband and the kids — all up.
You won’t fizzle out if you keep firing up.
And when you notice that you’re secure in staying small and sane; and that what’s bigger isn’t necessarily better, and that less is most time more, you know that Sabbath is working its way deep in you.
And you smile — this is the way to live July on.