We refuse to rest because, at some deep level, we’re convinced that if we stop, the thing for which we’re really living won’t be fed, pleased, or procured.– Adam Mabry in The Art of Rest
We are busy because we try to do too many things. We do too many things because we say yes to too many people. We say yes to all these people because we want them to like us and we fear their disapproval.
– Kevin DeYoung in Crazy Busy
The refusal to stop is a refusal to accept our creatureliness. It is a subtle rejection of God’s ability to rule his world, rescue his people, and rejuvenate them along the way.
– Adam Mabry in The Art of Rest
There is a time for work and there is a time for rest and recreation. We can dishonor God by working without rest or exercise just as much as we can by resting and exercising without working. The key to learning how to redeem the time is learning how to hold every activity of life in proper proportion, to know what is appropriate for what occasion, and to do it all to the glory of the triune God.
– Ryan McGraw in How Should I Manage Time?
We are here and there and everywhere. We are distracted. We are preoccupied. We can’t focus on the task in front of us. We don’t follow through. We don’t keep our commitments. We are so busy with a million pursuits that we don’t even notice the most important things slipping away.
– Kevin DeYoung in Crazy Busy
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
Brian J. Mikul 