The Illusion of Perpetual Motion: Why True Rest Remains Elusive
Is there a difference between rest and vacation? Americans are usually great at vacationing; we're terrible at rest.
We carefully plan itineraries, pack supplies, and research excursions. We collect experiences the way kids collect baseball cards, enjoying them for a moment, then filing them away in an old shoe box to look at every now and again.
I remember one summer, as a kid, when we did a tour that started in Chicago and covered Yellowstone, the Tetons, Rocky Mountains, a Dude Ranch, the Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, Wall Drug, and much more. It was amazing and I still remember it, but I can't imagine how exhausted my parents must have been afterwards. I do remember that by the time we were wrapping things up, we were so homesick that my Dad made the trip from Colorado home across I-80 in a single push. His classic "Home again, home again, jiggidy jig" as we pulled up never sounded so sweet.
While we enjoyed vacation, I don't know if we truly rested. Do we know how?
Larry Dossey describes “time-sickness.” He says we have an obsessive belief that “time is getting away, that there isn’t enough of it, and that you must pedal faster and faster to keep up.”
Carl Honoré noted: “The problem is that our love of speed, our obsession with doing more and more in less and less time, has gone too far; it has turned into an addiction, a kind of idolatry. Even when speed starts to backfire, we invoke the go-faster gospel. … Time-sickness can also be a symptom of a deeper, existential malaise. In the final stages before burnout, people often speed up to avoid confronting their unhappiness.”
We try to battle this time-sickness by swinging between productivity and distraction. At work we leverage technology to get more done, faster. With the introduction of email and cell phones we can work anywhere, which means many of us now work everywhere and at all times.
To counteract this, we then shift into distraction, scrolling on our phones, scanning through limitless streaming services, or planning busy vacations, thinking that these activities will somehow recharge our depleted batteries.
It does not work. These attempts at "rest" are often just more activities, more consumption, more doing. We fill our time, even our "down time," with noise and activity, leaving little room for true replenishment. The well of our souls remains dry, no matter how many digital feeds we scroll through or how many national parks we visit in a week.
A. J. Swoboda writes:
Our time-saving devices, technological conveniences, and cheap mobility have seemingly made life much easier and interconnected. As a result, we have more information at our fingertips than anyone in history. Yet with all this progress, we are ominously dissatisfied. In bowing at these sacred altars of hyperactivity, progress, and technological compulsivity, our souls increasingly pant for meaning and value and truth as they wither away, exhausted, frazzled, displeased, ever on edge. … Our bodies wear ragged. Our spirits thirst. We have an inability to simply sit still and be. As we drown ourselves in a 24/7 living, we seem to be able to do anything but quench our true thirst for the life of God. … The result … is that we have become perhaps the most emotionally exhausted, psychologically overworked, spiritually malnourished people in history.
We'll never find rest that way. Rest is something we find by embracing reality as God constructed it. God built us to need rest. Creation, before the Fall, had patterns of rest. God himself rested, not because he was tired, but because he reflected on the goodness of creation and to model what we need.
In both Jewish and Christian traditions, Sabbath practices easily become legalistic. It's easy to define a day by what we don't do rather than by what we innerly embrace. I grew up in a town where everything was closed on Sunday. I've heard people mocked for mowing their lawn on Sunday.
When Jesus was confronted about healing on the Sabbath, he didn't set the Sabbath aside; he declared himself "Lord of the Sabbath." He shifted the Sabbath from a day to a person. He becomes our Sabbath rest. The writer of Hebrews echoes this profound truth: "So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience." Hebrews 4:9-11
This helps us rest, not by avoiding work or finding distraction, but by finding true security and refreshment in the grace of Jesus. This isn't about mere cessation of activity, but a deep spiritual repose. It's a fundamental shift from striving for acceptance to resting in the acceptance already granted by God through Christ. As Richard Lovelace brilliantly writes:
"We start each day with our personal security resting not on the accepting love of God and the sacrifice of Christ but on our present feelings or recent achievements in the Christian life. Since these arguments will not quiet the human conscience, we are inevitably moved either to discouragement and apathy or to a self-righteousness which falsifies the record to achieve a sense of peace. The faith that is able to warm itself at the fire of God’s love, instead of having to steal love and self-acceptance from other sources, is actually the root of peace." -Richard Lovelace
True rest is much greater than a vacation—it's a fundamental reorientation of our souls towards God's grace. It's finding our true identity and worth in Christ, rather than in our achievements, our busyness, or our attempts at distraction. This doesn't mean vacations are bad; they can be wonderful opportunities for recreation and connection. But they are a supplement, not a substitute, for the deep and abiding rest found only in Jesus.
With you:
Pastor Tim
