This will be a bit of a ramble. I’m flexing my ‘stream of consciousness’ fingers starting…now.
In the daily hustle and bustle of a newsroom, it’s easy to overlook the non-emergency things until they become emergencies.
Some of you might even be thinking ‘been there, done that’…and I find myself taking shortcuts to speed up the things that I have to get done in order to get other things finished.
There are some days I go home and fall into bed exhausted and while drifting off to sleep I find myself thinking “Can’t call it a day yet! I’m not unconscious! I still have to…..ZZZZzzzzzzzz.” We joke about this in my family…we’ve even given it a nickname: ‘dooobee’—as in ‘do a lot’ and ‘busy as a bee’. In the story of Mary and Martha, I totally ‘get’ Martha. As a kid, I was always mad at Mary. ‘C’mon! Come help get this meal together! It’s not fixing itself!’ And when she didn’t move, calling in the reinforcements and asking Jesus to get her off her hiney…only to have Him side with her?? I was bafffled. (We’ll get back to this later)
The reality of it is that there are too many times I fall into the Israelite’s way of thinking: I am the sum of the bricks I made today. You do that too many times, and you start to believe it. There are a lot of bits in the Bible about rest…it even starts early in Genesis with God setting aside some critical time to REST. Yet much of His creation is frenetic with the doing, and lost in the ‘being’…which is what happens when you rest.
In the quiet of rest, you can actually hear things. You can hear our Heavenly Father telling you what a beautiful child you are…or maybe He might be whispering that answer to the question you keep asking (like a toddler: ‘now? now? now? how about now?’).
How do rest and bricks travel down the same road of thought? I’m not really sure they do. The bricks can create a false sense of worth, which leads somebody like me into thinking I have to keep producing in order to be valued. Rest helps me re-new…and I can understand worth far better when I’m being spoken to by our Father through the Word. Ah…Mary and Martha. Mary understood knowing Christ. If she knew His voice and understood what He was saying, it was much easier to obey. Martha understood the doing end with her servant gifting. As those gifted this way know, it’s very easy to take on too much and then stress over the details, even if it was originally meant to serve Christ…not being able to BE with Christ prevented her (and us) from the depth of relationship we sought in the first place.
This has to have a conclusion…so I’ll wind up by saying take the REST seriously. We are not the bricks we make because our worth was summed up in the death and resurrection of our Savior. Just sayin’.
