By Tamara Hill Murphy, Spiritual Director
As a new school year begins, families often feel pressure to return to a hectic routine of sports, activities, social events, and homework. Summer’s slower mornings become a dash against time and evenings a battle between school and extracurricular activities. Back-to-school routines can feel like the little break between a roller coaster’s sluggish climb to the top and the freefall into autumn’s overbooked days and weekends. At the peak of the roller coaster each August, we look over the edge of autumn and hope we can survive till June.
As a spiritual director, I frequently ask directees this question: How might Jesus be praying for us in the reality of our circumstances? Similarly, I wonder what it would be like to reflect on God’s expectations for our back-to-school season by listening to how Jesus might be praying for us. Would we hear him ask God to help us come to him for rest instead of hauling our heavy-laden backpacks of demands and expectations on our own shoulders?
We might feel there is nothing we can do to change the chaos of this season, but Jesus says we can learn how to work alongside him from a place of rest. Is it possible for us to trust that God’s intentions for us are good and that Jesus’ invitation can be taken seriously in the reality of our harried days?
Of Jesus’ words in Matthew 11, Bishop Todd writes:
“In place of the word ‘rest,’ William Tyndale’s early translation of the Bible has Jesus saying, ‘I will ease you.’ The idea is that we are relieved. Relieved from the duty we have felt to remain in charge and alleviate the pain and disorientation caused by the stressors of life. To be at ease includes being rescued from trouble, bother and difficulty— the nervous, uptight way we do life. Those at ease still do good work—a lot of it. But they move at a new, graceful pace.”
This school year, we live and move and have our back-to-school beings in this burden-lifting God. Jesus, who has fulfilled every burdensome requirement of our fallen world and who shoulders the weight of the heavy load, says we can learn a way to enter this new season at a graceful pace.
How might we trust God’s good intentions for us to live freely and lightly in every season?
Enough Rest for Today
Many of us hope to “store up rest” in summer. Like a chipmunk stuffing acorns in her cheeks, we pack our summer calendars with restful things, hoping it will sustain us through fall, winter, and spring’s scarce rest. Like sleep, rest doesn’t work this way.
Similar to the manna in the wilderness, God nourishes us with enough rest for each day. When Israel complained that there was not enough food to sustain them, God freely provided all that each person needed. Sabbath rest is the daily bread God provides us not only once a week, but every day of our lives. And we don’t receive it by hoarding or ignoring it. We receive by gathering and partaking.
Spiritual formation writer Adele Calhoun describes Sabbath as “God’s gift of repetitive and regular rest… . Time for being in the midst of a life of doing …” But how is it possible to just be while we also have much we must do?
Sabbath, like manna, is something we obey and something we receive. It’s simple, but so countercultural to our forced rhythms of productivity and frenetic recreation that it may be one of the most difficult of all of the commandments. Imagine if our first thought when sending our kids back to school had to do with holding each other accountable to abstain from work one day a week and to find rest each day!
If that sounds preposterous, consider this: During Sabbath rest, we stop doing and are renewed in the beloved being of God. In response to this, a Sabbath practice means we take one whole day to cease work and savor being loved by God’s beloved being, and we then carry that belovedness with us into every day of our lives. As with all of God’s commandments, keeping the Sabbath frees us to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
Here are three key paradigm shifts that can help us practice the restful way of Jesus this school year.
1) Plan for daily and weekly rest, a to-rest list rather than a to-do list.
Start by setting aside one day a week to rest and worship God. If you don’t yet enjoy a regular day of Sabbath, begin there. That, for now, is your back-to-school schedule for sabbath rest. This is how you will orient your entire week toward rest.
Next, consider how rest and work shape the remaining days of your week. Focus on the transitions between night and morning, morning and midday, midday and evening, and evening and night. Consider how orienting yourself to Jesus’ restful way helps you navigate the inevitable interruptions and unexpected changes to your day. Rather than doubling down on your to-do list, each disruption can call you to pause, a moment at a time, in God’s restful, loving presence. Much like a church bell calls monks to stop their work and tend to prayer, a pause in response to disruption will orient your days toward rest.
2) Name the fears hidden in the busyness of your schedule.
Belovedness brings rest; fear brings restlessness. Jeremy Stefano, a spiritual formation minister, writes that much of our resistance to sabbath rest is rooted in unexamined fear of falling behind and worry about getting ahead. Honest self-assessment in the loving companionship of Jesus and his community will help us name the ways these two fears motivate the way we fill our schedules (and our children’s).
When Jesus invites us to come to him for rest, he is inviting us, not despite our human tendencies to force our lives into ill-fitting systems, but because of them. His invitation embraces our humanity and invites us to live in unforced rhythms designed by our creator, a God who both works and rests as an outpouring of belovedness rather than anxious striving.
3) Begin again.
In my book The Spacious Path: Practicing the Restful Way of Jesus in a Fragmented World, I invite readers to hear the words attributed to Saint Benedict, “Always, we begin again.” The God who daily gave fresh manna in the wilderness gives us new mercies each morning. When we feel like we’re free-falling into a chaotic schedule, God’s mercy allows us to pause. Remember that every part of our lives is held together in Jesus, and we can return our anxious thoughts and tired bodies to God’s restful, loving presence.
In God’s economy—the kingdom where Jesus invites us to work with him—we find that the restful way of Jesus always leads through the present reality, rather than some envisioned future ideal or nostalgic past. God works from a place of rest, never separating the two realms. Not only that, but God transcends our cultural constructs for work time and rest, where one helps us “earn” the other. God’s restful presence is among us right now—in our kitchens and classrooms, standing desks and sit-down meetings, delivery rooms and delivery trucks— inviting us to work and rest in the company of Jesus. All of this, held together in Christ, shapes our actual calendars and to-do lists into an act of worship we give back to God.
Although Sabbath rest may not be the total cure for all back-to-school-related stress, it is a generous rule and gift God gives each one of us. Sabbath rest is much more than merely taking a day off; it is one of the most important spiritual practices to help us remember again and again that—apart from anything we can do or not do—our identity is found in the image of the triune God who created work and rest. In Sabbath rest, our being is re-centered within God’s beloved being. God works and God rests. Jesus is the rest of God given to us; He is Lord Rest.
Lord of the Sabbath and Lord of back-to-school, help us rest with you. Amen.
Tamara Hill Murphy is the author of The Spacious Path: Practicing the Restful Way of Jesus in a Fragmented World (Herald Press). She is a Spiritual Director and Supervising Faculty member of Selah-Anglican, a certificate program in spiritual direction with Leadership Transformations, Inc. She lives with her husband, Brian, an Anglican priest, in Bridgeport, CT. Find her at www.tamarahillmurphy.com.
Author’s Note: Portions of this article are taken from The Spacious Path: Practicing the Restful Way of Jesus in a Fragmented World.