Thinking about rest.
I read Kenison’s memoir, The Gift of an Ordinary Day, not long ago. Her definition of home sticks with me. “Home can be anyplace in which we create our own sense of rest and peace as we tend to the spaces in which we eat and sleep and play. It is a place that we create and re-create in every moment, at every stage of our lives, a place where the plain and common becomes cherished and the ordinary becomes sacred.
Home is anyplace where we create a sense of rest.
We rest at home – and we are most at home when we rest in our relationship with God!
Genesis 2:15 (AMP) – “So the Lord God took the man [He had made] and settled him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it.” The Hebrew word for “settled him” implies rest, safety, fellowship with God. God established rest for Adam and Eve in the garden.
And of course, we messed that up … but then Jesus extends an amazing invitation for rest in Matthew 11:28-29 … “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavily burdened [by religious rituals that provide no peace], and I will give you rest [refreshing your souls with salvation]. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me [following Me as My disciple], for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest (renewal, blessed quiet) for your souls.
We rest when we yoke ourselves to the One who has completed the work for us!
Then in that day
Isaiah 11:10
The nations will make supplications to the Root of Jesse
Who will stand as a signal for the peoples;
And His resting place will be glorious.
St. Augustine wrote about his salvation experience:
“You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in You….Who shall bring me to rest in You? Who will send You into my heart so to overwhelm it that my sins shall be blotted out and I may embrace You, my only good?…. Behold, the ears of my heart are before You, O Lord; open them and say to my soul, ‘I am your salvation’. I will hasten after that voice, and I will lay hold upon You.”
(Confessions, Book I)
Thomas Moore writes, “We may have to learn again the mystery of the garden: how its external characteristics model the heart itself, and how the soul is a garden enclosed, our own perpetual paradise where we can be refreshed and restored.”
The soul, my soul … a garden enclosed!
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