work and rest

How do you heal? Well, the beautiful thing is that Jesus heals. We don’t heal. We cannot heal ourselves and no person can heal us and no method can heal us and no behavioral therapy or psychology or medicine heals just jesus. Which is why I will not be a very good social worker because I don’t believe in the philosophy that underlies social work. Which is fine with me. God called me to be a disciple, not a social worker. And I will study social work for the glory of God because he calls us to care for the poor and social workers care for the poor, the broken, the captives. So we know how to heal. We get as close to Jesus as we can. Through the word. The word is beyond precious. It transforms hearts. And we pray. And we write. And we be with people we love, and we go deep with people who love him. And we serve people who are growing, walk with them. This is all part of healing. And healing involves lots of resting which is my least favorite thing because I am afraid of healing because I believe lies. God promised me both work and rest. As Bonheoffer said,

“Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. He will only do harm to himself and to the community…But the reverse is also true: let him who is not in community beware of being alone.”

And I would venture to say that this is equally true for rest and work. Work, of course, is never secular because nothing secular for the Christian. All is spiritual. All is an opportunity to obey and worship God, or to obey and worship self or other idols. And all work is ministry and missional, because we are with people. Likewise, all rest is spiritual and either obeys and glorifies God (who commands us to rest, I always remind myself). When I reject rest, I reject God. Who designed rest, in His infinite wisdom. He could have made us to not need rest. Or sleep. Or food. But He did. And as he says over and over again in Scripture, He does what He does to bring glory to himself. My rest glorifies God because it allows me and my life to say, He is God and I am not. He is powerful and I am weak. He deserves all the glory. He has done all the work. I am His. He chose me. He saved me. He is redeeming me. For his own glory.

So, let him who cannot rest beware of work. And let him who will not work beware of rest.