Living Your True Size
I long to live with a soul awake to God, free to answer his call to co-create with Him. You too? But sometimes I’m so weary that the first step to having my soul awakened must be re-learning to rest. This was true for me when I returned from four years working as an obstetrician in the mountains of Afghanistan. At times I’d been the only doctor for 150,000 people. By my final weeks there, I was answering radio consults and writing protocols from bed, so sick it took two tries to drag myself on hands and knees to our outhouse-style bathroom, but still so driven to help meet the endless needs that I was unable to rest.
Early in my time in Afghanistan, I knew God was calling me to rest. I’d even led a study for our team, sharing what I heard of God’s heart through some of the 300+ mentions of rest in the Bible. Many of the verses held commands to rest. Others offered promises that God would bring rest. I knew Jesus included me in his call, “Come to me, all you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”
I had first come to him decades before, but as my body and soul both ached to rest I needed to keep coming, daily, living as close to his heart as I could. But how, how could I come and rest? What did that look like when faced with unending lines of sick and needy patients?
Learning to live in the rest that Jesus offers will be, for me, a life-long journey. But through these past dozen years of chronic physical illness and PTSD and a shift from practicing medicine to writing and offering spiritual direction, I’ve experienced Jesus calling me, again and again, to come and rest. (I’m so grateful for his gentle persistence!) And one small step at a time, I’m learning how to more easily receive and enjoy the rest that God longs to give his children—no matter what’s going on around us.
A Few Days in Paradise
One of the steps in my journey to rest in Christ’s love came a few years after I’d arrived home from Afghanistan, after I’d finally accepted that my body wasn’t going to be able to return to the 24 hour shifts and hours of standing that obstetrics required, and had given up my license to practice medicine.
I’d begun to study theology part-time, eager to dive deeper into who God is, listening for his call to me in the time of transition. As a new term was about to begin, I accepted the invitation of family friends to visit them for a few days. They called the section of coast where they lived “paradise” and, aside from the daddy long legs stalking me in the shower, it pretty much was.
When I arrived, my hostess led me to a soft yellow and blue bedroom with hydrangea blossoms on the dresser and a rocking chair in the corner. Lounge chairs waited by the waterfall in the back garden, and a kayak sat ready for a paddle among the islands. These were all part of the gift, helping me rest, but for me they weren’t the heart of paradise.
The heart of that paradise—the gift that, more than any other, drew me into rest—was the freedom to be my true size.
A lack of urgency resided there. A comfort with being human—with beauty and mess, hunger and joy, fatigue and tears and laughter. Dirty dishes and fruit flies were part of life, taken care of in their time, but coexisting quite happily for a while with sweet nectarines and gouda sandwiches and fresh blackberries capped with ginger yoghurt cream. On the days that I could, my hostess was happy for me to wipe the crumbs off her counter. When illness took hold, she knew how to make a bed in the warm air where I could listen to the bees and watch the sun set the maple keys aflame. She had often done it for others; she would do it for me. There, I felt in my body and soul the truth: I am human and small and it’s okay. Life is not an emergency and I can lay down control.
Back to the real world?
I was sad to leave that place, to start back to the busyness of fall. I feared being pressed and pulled by the world ungently, urgently, forcing me to the center where I do not belong, driving me (by dint of my exaggerated self-importance) to shoulder burdens I was not meant to carry.
Urgency takes my eyes off the One who has everything under control, blinding me with the belief that the well-being of the world is up to me. It tricks me into thinking that the world of the urgent is the real world and rest is a brief and tantalizing illusion.
But Jesus speaks:
“Come to me, all you weary and burdened ones, and I will give you rest. . . ”
In the original Greek, “I will give you rest” is actually one word, better translated, “I will rest you.”
“Come to me, all you weary and burdened ones, and I will rest you. . .”
In other words, rest isn’t something Jesus gives us, separate from himself. Rest is what comes as we learn to live our true size in Jesus’ love: small and fragile and (rightly) dependent, and cherished and made great in his love.
“Come to me, all you weary and burdened ones, and I will rest you. . .”
It’s a permanent offer, and one without condemnation. No fear of our humanness. No shame or embarrassment or impatience with our need to rest. Just invitation. “Come. I will rest you.” Those days apart I tasted the real world, the world of welcome and invitation and the love that invites us into rest.
Can It Get Any Better Than This?
It’s hard to find better news in this hurried world than a genuine invitation to rest, and someone both able and committed to helping us enter and enjoy it. But it does get better, because Jesus doesn’t stop with the invitation to come and rest. He shows us how to keep living that rest even while we work.
“ . . Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke fits perfectly, and the burden I give you is light”
This is the bit that challenges me.
It’s one thing to settle into rest when I’m on the Sunshine Coast, tucked into a rocking chair in a cool, quiet bedroom, or lying outside feeling the warm air on my face and listening to the whir of hummingbird wings. It’s quite another to live that rest with a stethoscope around my neck or a keyboard and a deadline in front of me.
But this is also where I learn the foundation of true rest: living close to the one who is gentle and humble in heart. And not just living close to him, but learning from him. Listening to his heart that beats with love both for those I serve and for me. Learning, over time, to let my own heart beat with humility and gentleness along with his.
Gentle and humble: This, I think is why we find rest as we take Jesus’ yoke and learn from him. He is not in a hurry. He has nothing to prove, is unpretentious, non-competitive. Over and over, in my fear and slowness to change and struggle to trust, I find Jesus gently inviting me to come closer, or, when I’ve been too afraid to do that, reassuring me that it’s okay, that he will wait, that he knows and loves me and I am safe in his love.
Gentle and humble: It’s why it’s safe to come to him, to be honest with him in our weariness and fear. It’s also, I think, how Jesus helps us rest. As we learn from him, learn in our bodies and souls the safety of his love and his welcome, we begin to find that we are safe enough to live gently and humbly. We don’t need to race through our days, trying to prove our worth, for we are already loved.
It’s a life-long learning, as I’ve said. Sometimes, for me, learning to live gently looks like remembering that Jesus fed multitudes with a little boy’s lunch. He doesn’t ask me to bake twenty loaves, just to offer him the five small loaves that I have. Often it looks like paying attention to my body’s demands for rest, my soul’s need to be still with God, and choosing to pause and receive God’s good gift of rest. It means bringing the anxiety I may feel about my incomplete do-list to Jesus and letting him gently remind me that it’s okay, he doesn’t expect me to be God. That’s his job.
And then it’s stepping out again in the small ways he calls me to step out, often returning to this list of ten simple reminders that help me live in the freedom of smallness while stepping out. Or these few words that encourage me to just do what he tells me and trust the results with him.
It’s a life-long learning, but we have One walking with us who is committed to leading us beside still waters and restoring our soul as part of guiding us in paths of right-relatedness with himself, ourselves, and this world that he loves.
And, wonder of wonders, God bringing his people into rest—whether in the days of Moses as he led them through the Red Sea or now as he leads us deeper into the gentle love of Jesus—is a great part of how he brings glory to his name:
“[L]ike cattle that go down to the plain,
they were given rest by the Spirit of the Lord.
This is how you guided your people
to make for yourself a glorious name.”
Thanks be to God.
P.S. If you’d like to soak a little longer in Jesus’ invitation to come and rest, I’ve created a five-day prayer guide that I’d love to share with you. You can find it here.
