WRITTEN BY AMBER TREMBLETT

Picture yourself as being made up of a series of wells. These wells contain your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energy. From each of these wells, you draw on the energy you need to live. Each day you take from these wells, neglecting to replenish the energy in each one, so that eventually there is nothing left to draw on, and you begin to break down, to deteriorate, to suffer.

Our wells all have different capacities. Some of us can feel that depletion almost immediately, while some of us may be able to operate with our wells close to empty for a very long time.

The latter has been my reality for as long as I can remember. And no matter how well I’ve been able to maintain my life, to keep up appearances, it does not change the truth that when we refuse to rest we slowly diminish ourselves. Bit by bit, we give ourselves away without considering what we need to do to restore ourselves to wholeness. We prevent ourselves from becoming who we truly are.

But we can begin to change that as we learn to understand rest as healing.

Rest is Wholeness

With rest, we can undo the pain we’ve caused ourselves; we can undo the harm that 21st century hustle culture has done to us.

**With rest we can journey toward wholeness, a wholeness that God has always desired for us.**

One of the things that Jesus consistently and intentionally does in the gospels is heal on the Sabbath day. His healings are one of the biggest points of contention for the religious leaders. The Pharisees and Sadducees saw Jesus’ healing miracles as a violation of Jewish law.

In Luke 7:10-17, Jesus healed a woman whose back pain had prevented her from walking upright for eighteen years. In response to this healing, the leader of the Synagogue said to the crowds “‘There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured and not on the Sabbath day.’” (Luke 7:14, NRSVUE).

Listen to Jesus’ response: “‘You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger and lead it to water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?’” (Luke 10:15-16, NRSVUE).

Jesus was not going to let this woman suffer on a day that was supposed to be about refreshment.

To put it quite simply, the religious leaders saw this miraculous healing as work, but Jesus did not. Their observance of the Sabbath had become superficial, had become another type of work: the work of keeping up appearances, of following strict rules.

Their Sabbath was not true rest.

They had lost sight of what the Sabbath really was: A time for healing.

Jesus’ deliberate choice to heal people on the Sabbath is his attempt to remind them of this fundamental truth. And when we read God’s word, he reminds us of the same.

Rest Is Recovery

Jesus reminds us that for as long as God has made rest holy, its purpose has been to make us new, make us whole, to heal us. And this purpose goes beyond just our own bodies.

In Leviticus 25, God commanded the Israelites to make every seventh year a sabbatical year for their fields. During this year, they were to let the land rest for the entire year, giving it time to naturally regain its nutrients, to recover from the constant stress of growing new crops.

Rest is recovery. Jesus healed on the Sabbath because that is what the Sabbath is for.

**And that is what God is doing when we rest: healing us.**

I’ll be the first to admit that I am not always diligent about taking time off to rest. Recently, for the first time in months, I took two full days off during the week. It was incredible how easy the remainder of the week became when I took that time to rest. My physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wells were replenished. I had enthusiasm and motivation. I actually liked my job.

When we rest, the healing we receive through God’s holy presence spills over into the rest of our week. We are more equipped to be ourselves. We bring a wholeness to our work that is given to us by God.

Rest Is the Cure

We use our busy-ness as an excuse not to confront all the ways we are hurting. We give ourselves permission to ignore our needs because we don’t have time to address them. As I navigate my own relationship with rest, I have come to learn that rest would give us this time if we only let it.

In rest, we come face to face with all the ways our constant need to hustle has hindered our ability to care for ourselves. In rest, God gives us time to recover, to learn to heal, to feed our minds, our hearts, and our souls with all the activities, people, and places that make us whole.

We need the healing that God provides us in his holy rest more than we know. God is calling you to rest, to begin to heal from all the ways hustle culture has been tearing you down, exhausting you, and using you.

Hustle culture is a disease.
Resting with intention, with commitment, in resistance, with God, is the cure.

About the Author

Amber Tremblett is a full-time Anglican priest in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Besides writing, she expresses her creativity through crocheting and figure skating. She loves to read and is an avid consumer of book-related social media content. Amber's favourite place to rest is by the ocean. If you’d like to read more of Amber’s writing, she has been published in Clayjar Review, and she runs a personal blog, which you can find at amberiswriting.wordpress.com.

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