True Rest and Boo Radley
a non-golf reflection
TRUE REST and BOO RADLEY
Last year I had a 3-month sabbatical. I had a hard time figuring out how to talk about it.
How do you talk about going a sabbatical?
“I have been given a sabbatical? I am taking a sabbatical? A sabbatical has been approved for me?”
And it wasn’t just me.
You know that it is hard to describe or understand what you are doing when everyone seems to respond in a different way and none of those responses make you comfortable.
“Congratulations”
“Well, you have certainly earned it”
“You deserve it”
“That will be so great for you”
If I have learned one thing in ministry over the years it is that people don’t often know what to say, and people often don’t say the right thing, and that I am very often that person. The loss of a loved one, a divorce, the loss of a home to a flood or a fire. The reality is that when we are talking about something as sacred as these, there may not be a right-thing to say.
It may be that sabbath is one of those things as well. Sabbath rest has been around since the beginning of time (longer than death and loss have been around) and yet it is so peculiarly situated in the divine realm that while we know that it is there, we don’t know how to handle it.
In the Book of Genesis, the very first full day that mankind existed was a day of rest. If that is any guide, then the most foundational experience of humanity on this earth was a day of rest. During our first day, God rested from all his work and in doing so set the pattern for all of creation to work and rest in a rhythm for all of time.
So, what was I going to do, and what was my family going to do during this sabbatical? I didn’t know. I didn’t know how to answer that question. I did know that it was not something that I earned, and I did not deserve it and was certainly not something that warranted “congratulations” from people who heard about it.
However, I knew that (the rest) was there, somewhere.
I found where I had explained it this way (before our time away began).
Date: July 2023
Whatever this rest is that we are supposed to find feels like it could be standing behind the door like Boo Radley at the end of To Kill a Mockingbird. Like Boo, this kind of rest has been sending me little care packages along the way, leaving clues like small toys and treats in places where I can find them. But it may be that this type of rest evades our attention because we are ashamed of it. It represents what we do not want people to focus on when they look at our lives. I once read that the need for physical rest will stop you in your tracks. If your body does not sleep then rest will seek you out and thrust itself upon you in the way of exhaustion, illness, catastrophic failure. You cannot hide from it forever; it will run you down.
But rest for the soul is different, it must be pursued with intention; the stillness that your soul needs doesn’t track you down if you neglect it. It waits at a distance. In our refusal to seek spiritual rest, we push it farther away until we don’t recognize it anymore.
But sometimes in moments of physical exhaustion the spiritual rest that God offers us steps in and scoops us up and carries us home to recover in our beds. When it does, maybe it waits behind the door, making sure that we are okay. Maybe we can learn to take that kind of rest by the hand sometimes and go with it to sit on the porch swing and become acquainted. Maybe we will realize that TRUE rest is not as scary as we once thought and if we embrace it and protect it and see it for what it is, it might deepen our understanding of God himself and of who He created us to be.
