rest on Making Space

[D]o you have margin in your life, like the white spaces between these words and the edges of the page? Having margin is about intentionally scheduling white space in your calendar to pray, rest, read...

People in a hurry never have time for recovery. Their minds have little time to meditate and pray so that problems can be put in perspective. In short, people in our age are showing signs of physiolog...

If you are a pastor…this one’s for you. Sabbath. So many things have been written. Most of us have taught our people or preached about Sabbath, and underscored how busy people in our churches re...

Make a Sabbath box. When you set aside time for Sabbath—whether it is an hour, a morning, or a day—put in the box those things you do not want to use…. You can also use the Sabbath box to hold all the...

In the desert outside of Tucson, scientists dreamed up an experiment to re-create the conditions of earth for space, when and if the earth could not be made great again. The biosphere was a little wor...

In the story of grace, the lack of hurry makes room for presence.

On retreat we stop avoiding the pain of the disconnect between our deepest desires and the way we are actually living. We have time and space to reflect on our life rhythms to see if they are really w...

Extravagant wastefulness in time might prove the most productive thing you choose for yourself.

People think the sabbath is antiquated; I think it will save us for ourselves… When we rest, we do so in memory of rest denied. We receive what has been withheld from ourselves and our ancestors. And...

Ron Roheiser points out three images for retreat used in Scripture that meet us in our yearning; all of them apply in different ways at different times.  ● There is the lonely place to which Jesus ...

In his highly insightful work, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith shares the importance of finding ways to rest and relax as part of a healthy, balanced life: I once read a book in which the author sa...

Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be...

Rest time is not waste time. It is economy to gather fresh strength... It is wisdom to take occasional furlough. In the long run, we shall do more by sometimes doing less.

Ignoring God's Stop Sign Have you ever been driving and inadvertently blown right through a stop sign?  It happened to me recently. Anne and I were down in San Francisco meeting some friends, I w...

Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.

Our Sabbath project grew out of a desire to reclaim some of the unhurried wonder of those early days of parenthood—to see what would happen if, on one day out of seven, we stopped working, striving, a...

Sometimes the most urgent and vital thing you can possibly do is take a complete rest

Good God, We have a lot going on. You are a God of grace, And we are made in your likeness. Let us then be people of grace. Meet our human concerns with the fruit of your Spirit: Love for ourselves...

Dolce far niente—“the sweetness of doing nothing.” One of the most powerful soul-training exercises I have ever done is a practice called holy leisure. In simple terms, holy leisure is “doing nothi...

In his highly insightful work, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith shares insights on the topic of rest from the poet David Whyte: [The] poet David Whyte opens our minds and hearts to rest when he writ...

In her book Invitation to Retreat , Ruth Haley Barton shares some of the many insights she has had since she began intentionally taking intentional retreats to re-connect with God and her own des...

Thank you, Lord, for this season of sun and slow motion, of games and porch sitting, of picnics and light green fireflies on heavy purple evenings; and praise for slight breezes. It’s good, God...

One of the dangers of living in a constant state of distraction is that we never go to the bottom of our pain, our sadness, our emptiness, which means we never find that rock-bottom place of the peace...

Leader : Let us go before our God, confessing the ways we have dismissed His plan for internal peace from our lives. Leader : Heavenly Father, we crave rest and seek it everywhere but with You...

When we hear the word retreat many of us think of the military use of the word, which refers to the tactic troops use when they are losing too much ground, when they are tired and ineffective, a...

Sadly, the need for recovery is often viewed as evidence of weakness rather than an integral aspect of sustained performance. The result is what we give almost no attention to renewing and expanding o...

It’s the rest in a piece of music that gives it resonance and shape.

For much of the twentieth century, futurists and other labor experts were predicting ever shorter workweeks. In the mid-1920s, for example, Julian Huxley said that the two-day workweek was “inevitable...

The defining problem driving people out is …just how American life works in the 21st century. Contemporary American life simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is d...

Rest is a practice because the “work” of rest is rooted in the finished work of God.