Too much work,– Mark Buchanan in The Rest of God
But all that hurry has gotten me no farther ahead. It’s actually set me back. It’s diminished me. My efforts to gain time have only lost it. Whole epochs of my existence have swept by me in a blur, with nary a cheap souvenir to remember them by. There are seasons and seasons of my life swallowed whole, buried in a black hole of forgetting…. Through all that haste, I thought I was making up time. It turns out I was throwing it away.
– Mark Buchanan in The Rest of God
A Sabbath heart is restful even in the midst of unrest and upheaval. It is attentive to the presence of God and others even in the welter of much coming and going, rising and falling. It is still and knows God even when mountains fall into the sea.– Mark Buchanan in The Rest of God
Setting apart an entire day, one out of seven, for feasting and resting and worship and play is a gift and not a burden, and neglecting the gift too long will make your soul, like soil never left fallow, hard and dry and spent.– Mark Buchanan in The Rest of God
Without rest, we miss the rest of God: the rest he invites us to enter more fully so that we might know him more deeply. “Be still, and know that I am God.” Some knowing is never pursued, only received. And for that, you need to be still.
– Mark Buchanan in The Rest of God
God made us from dust. We’re never too far from our origins. The apostle Paul says we’re only clay pots – dust mixed with water, passed through fire. Hard, yes, but brittle too. Knowing this, God gave us the gift of Sabbath – not just a day, but an orientation, a way of seeing and knowing. Sabbath-keeping is a form of mending. It’s mortar in the joints. Keep Sabbath, or else break too easily, and oversoon. Keep it, otherwise our dustiness consumes us, becomes us, and we end up able to hold exactly nothing.
– Mark Buchanan in The Rest of God
Brian J. Mikul 