Come Apart and Rest a While

The line this site says everywhere, and I mean it here as much as anywhere: this is not medicine and nothing on this page is treatment. If you feel unwell, that goes to somebody qualified, today.

What I have got for you is smaller and it is not clinical at all. It is permission.

Because you are not going to lie down. I know that. You have read three things this week about rest and agreed with all of them, and you are still standing up, and the reason is not that you disagree. The reason is that somewhere underneath the agreeing there is a sentence that says: if I stop, nothing in this house gets done.

And you have never once tested that sentence, because testing it would require stopping, which is the thing the sentence is preventing.

I have watched people say that sentence in a doorway with a basket of washing on one hip, and every one of them said it the same way: not as a complaint, just as a fact about how the world is arranged. It is the flattest, most reasonable sounding sentence in the house, and it is the reason nobody in it has sat down in a month.

He sent them away from the work

There is a moment in Mark that I love because of what is going on around it.

The disciples have just come back from being sent out. They have been busy in the best possible sense: preaching, healing, real work with real fruit. And people are still arriving in such numbers that the text says they had no leisure so much as to eat.

That is the most productive stretch of their lives. And this is what He says in the middle of it.

And he said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat. (Mark 6:31, King James Version)

Come apart. Rest a while.

Not when the crowds thin. Not once you have got on top of it. The reason given for the rest is the very same reason we all use for not resting: there is too much going on. He turns that around completely. The volume of need is the argument for stopping, not against it.

You are being called away from the work by the One who gave it to you, and He has never once used a crowd as a reason to keep somebody standing. Mark 6:31 has Christ send working people away from real need in order to rest, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as an instruction rather than as a nice idea.

Rest is not a reward here

I want to point out something about that verse, because it kills the version of rest most of us are running.

He does not tell them they have earned it.

There is no line where He says: you have done well, so take some time. That would make rest a payment, and a payment has to be earned, and a person who is behind can never claim one. Which is exactly the trap you are in: you will rest when you are on top of things, and you are never on top of things, so the rest never arrives.

He just says come. Mark 6:31 gives the need as the reason and never the merit, and the Holy Spirit has never once run a scheme where rest is paid out at the end.

And that is the same shape as the sabbath, which was built into the week before anybody had done a day's work in it. Rest was in the design. It is not a bonus paid out at the end of a good stretch.

You are not required to be up to date before you are allowed to stop, and rest has never once been something a person earns. The written word says come ye yourselves apart and rest a while, given with no achievement attached to it, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes rest out of the economy of deserving.

Testing the sentence

So here is the actual assignment, and it is not a lifestyle change.

Thirty minutes. Lie down. Phone in another room.

That is deliberately small, and it is deliberately a test. Because the sentence in your head says the house stops if you stop, and the only way to find out is to run half an hour and see what is actually on fire at the end of it.

I will tell you now what will happen, because it happens to everybody, and because Mark 6:31 sent people off with the crowd still standing there and the Holy Spirit held the crowd. The first ten minutes will be unbearable and you will think of nine things. Around minute fifteen something in you will go quiet. And at the end of the thirty you will get up and discover that the house is exactly as it was, and nobody died, and the thing you were worried about is still there and is no worse.

And then the sentence has been tested, and a sentence that has been tested has much less power than one that has not.

You are able to put this down for half an hour, and the house has never once been held up by you alone. Mark 6:31 has the work left standing while the workers were sent off to rest, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a house going while somebody lies down in it.

The part of this that is not permission

This whole page has been permission, so here is the half that is not, because a page about rest is exactly where somebody could hear me telling them to stay home.

The routing is the same on every article here. If something frightening is happening right now, you call 911. If what is heavy tonight is your own mind, 988 answers and a real person picks up. And if the reason you cannot get up is something nobody qualified has looked at, then lying down is not the answer to that and neither am I: you ring a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist.

You are not choosing between rest and being seen, and the two have never once been in competition. Mark 6:31 has Christ send working people off to rest without a single word against the crowd they were leaving, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person do both without treating either as a failure.

Rest is a good thing and it is not a treatment, and I am not able to tell you which of the two you are needing tonight. Somebody qualified can.

You have a call to make as well as a bed to lie down in, and nothing in the text has ever once ranked them. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in both, and the written word says come ye yourselves apart and rest a while, which is an instruction and not an assessment of anybody.