Rest. There are many different things folks consider to be restful. Sleeping. Painting. Reading. Lingering in a hot bath or curled up in front of a good movie. For me, I thought feeling rested would come after sleeping, reading, or going online. But these things were not promoting any sort of rest at all. I would sleep for hours, or be online, or lay in the hammock with a good book. But I never felt rested. It was baffling to me, but, worse yet, it was angering me. When I was home, I felt like I needed absolute silence. Any little scrap of noise had the potential of sending me over the edge, light years away from any sort of reasonable level of anger. Eventually I got to the point of going through medical testing to see if anything was physically wrong with me to promote feeling consistently, tired, depressed and aggravated. To further baffle and frustrate me, according to the tests, I was in perfect health. There was absolutely nothing wrong with my blood sugar, cholesterol, or blood pressure. In fact, they were perfect. Why then, was I feeling so lousy?
It took me several months of feeling this was before I had had enough. One day, I woke up and I just felt a strong urge to go hiking. There's a resort just up the road from me called Whistling Thorns. I spent some time there, but still felt very restless and discontent. I didn't need to be sitting by a pool, I needed to hike. As I walked up the exit road, I noticed across the street there was miles and miles of untouched African wilderness. So, I took off. I didn't have any food, and only a liter of water. Up until that moment, I would get very winded with any sort of climbing or walking. What amazed me, traipsing through the hills and valleys, was that I didn't get winded at all. In fact, I wasn't hungry or even thirsty. All the way, I spoke with God, and allowed Him to speak with me. At times I sat and marveled at God's beauty. Sometimes I prayed or took pictures. Although I hiked for a good three hours or more, when I got home, I noticed that, for the first time in months, I actually felt very rested. I felt rejuvenated. I felt restored.
OK, so here's the deal: sleep does not equal rest. If you lay your head down on your pillow without having spoken to God, you're laying down with all of your worries and thoughts and burdens and there's no way you can ever get good quality rest. When you feel you need to rest, it's imperative that you "rest well". I was very surprised to find that, for me, hiking and being out in nature is one of the best ways for me to find rest and respite. You wouldn't think that hiking over miles of hilly terrain is the best way to get rest. However, it isn't in the actual activity where you find the rest. You can't rely on that any more than you can rely on anything else in your life going exactly the way you planned it to go. It's how you use your environment that constitutes whether or not you're going to rest. It's allowing God to meet you wherever you are, in whatever you're doing. Once you've learned how to "rest well", you will find you will be able to "rest well" in whatever you're doing. Just yesterday, I went to a prayer retreat at a spirituality center. The leader of the retreat emphasized the center's requirement of absolute silence, so I thought it was going to be a quiet and peaceful place to be with the Lord, just like it always is when I'm in the wilderness. Upon arrival, the first thing I noticed was the construction. Men talking loudly back and forth, clanging hammers on steel in a maddening "chinese water torture" fashion. I also took inventory of every single person, place and thing that was not adhering to the silence rule. Children playing loudly at a nearby school. Kitchen staff clamoring with forks, knives and spoons. At first, I went to the farthest corner away from the noise that I could possibly get. It wasn't working for me. Instead of doing what I had come there to do, I was concentrating on what everyone else was doing. I remained in a struggle for forty five minutes before hearing the Lord ask me to put myself in the center of all the noise and confusion, and to talk to Him there. I couldn't understand why He was asking me this, and I didn't want to do it. But I did. After about a half hour of journaling and talking with God, I suddenly noticed all the din, even the sounds of the construction, weren't bothering me at all. All that mattered is that I was talking to the Lord. Everything else just went away. I "took the wilderness with me," as the leader put it.
None of my life situations have changed all that much since before God taught me how to "rest well". I'm still struggling with money and donations, and I'm still having to deal with immigration issues and all of the daily stressors that inevitably come up with living life in Kenya. The major difference now is how I feel about all of this, and how I'm handling it. Honestly, I feel great. I feel relaxed. I feel happier than I have felt in a long time. 3/4th of my appetite has been eliminated, and my intense, insatiable need for sugar and sweet things is a thing of the past. If I buy things like soda or juice, they now stay in my refrigerator for days instead of hours. Whatever I eat now thoroughly satisfies me for several hours. I don't get up for long periods in the middle of the night like I used to, because things that seemed like the end of the world aren't really that big of a deal anymore. And people notice this. No one has come up to me to tell me they've noticed a change, but people I've never met can sense that I feel calm, and happy. It never ceases to amaze me how such simple concepts can bring about such amazing realizations. Are you "resting well'?
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