Faithful Rest
I have always been a bit of a night owl.
Someone oh-so-willing to trade sleep for what seems like a noble thing—writing, a good book, deep conversations. Though, truthfully, sometimes the reasons are less noble and more mind-numbing. But who doesn’t love a good Netflix binge from time to time?
However, recently I have not been sleeping for other reasons. Reasons neither noble nor mind-numbing, just plain old exhausting. I refer to this kind of sleeplessness as panic planning, the act of staying up all night trying to figure out the details of your life that are entirely out of your control. It involves lots of job searches, resume updates, Google Docs, and spreadsheets. It is typically brought on by the knowledge that a life change is coming fast. The side effects are what you’d expect—anxious thoughts, a desperate need to feel in control, dark circles, and an increase of caffeine during the daylight hours.
For two weeks straight, panic planning stole my sleep and rest felt like such an abstract concept. Though I was asking God for it every night, rest seemed completely unattainable. I was getting frustrated, because didn’t Jesus himself say to us, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest”? So why couldn’t I be like the Psalmist who said, “In peace I will both lie down and sleep”? Where was that rest and peace for me?
Exhausted and desperate, I sought the Lord for answers. I asked Him to talk to me about rest and the life change coming and how to be able to sleep again—because clearly, I was missing something.
When I finally stopped long enough to actually ask Him the question, almost instantly, I understood.
He told me that He doesn’t call us into rest to tease us or sabotage our plans or set us back, but rather He calls us into rest as an act of faith—and that rest is possibly one of the greatest acts of faith we can manage.
It’s not that we don’t prepare for the future or get things done, but we do so understanding who ultimately holds our future in His hands. We operate out of rest as a declaration that He is good and sovereign. We enter into peace knowing and believing that He is trustworthy.
He went on to remind me of some of the fruits of the Spirit—peace and patience and joy—and showed me that my days hadn’t been marked by those. The fruits of the Spirit are the fruits of big faith, just like rest is. Though I was asking God for rest and saying I surrendered everything to Him, my actions were suggesting the total opposite.
I had always known that rest was good. I knew that God created us to rest and invited us into rest. I even understood that in a lot of ways it was even a commandment, but I had never ever directly associated it with the strength of my faith until that moment.
What He said seemed elementary—to rest is an act of faith. Yet if I let it, that truth holds the power to change everything about the way I walk into the next season of my life.
I’m working on letting it do just that, so every step I take in the months to come are full of faith and surrender, fueled only by the rest, peace, and total trust we find in our Savior.
I know there will still be nights my night-owl-heart stays awake long into the morning hours—for those noble and mind-numbing things it adores—but I’m saying goodbye to the panic planning, those anxious thoughts that only left me tired and worn out.
Instead, I’m choosing to enter into the sweet, faithful rest that our good Lord constantly extends. The faithful rest that knows and believes in Him who will meet me both in my sleep and in all my day-time efforts, and move in ways that I couldn’t have even thought to ask for or imagine.
A faithful rest that says with the Psalmist, “In peace, I will lie down and sleep.”
words by Jacqueline Winstead and photo by Kailin Richardson