Disciples, Apostles, and Saints!
Reflecting on the concept of rest this week, I’m reminded of a book I read last year: Saving Time by Jenny Odell is a brilliant meditation on time, life, and purpose. She breaks open our common understanding of time as something linear, physical, like a commodity that we can buy and sell, make or spend. That time exists outside of our lives. That it is something that can be measured, othered, and ultimately separate from us. From what we do.
All of this is fiction. But our language itself compels us to think this way. We cannot make time like it is a sandwich. Or spend it like cash (or credit). Time is. Living is.
And once we free ourselves from this view of time, as something unrelated to our living, that measurable other, then we can start to take agency for our lives, our decisions, our way of being.
When we “make time” in our schedule for rest, we are hoping to invent a pocket in the cosmos that allows us to keep pretending as if work is most important, as if doing is what we are made for, and that all of that can somehow continue as normal, but this extra pocket over here—that is for rest. This is as insane as it is pervasive. And this thinking is also anti-Christ.
Following Jesus means rest is as much a part of the deal as work. We don’t “make” time for work. Or “spend” time that way. We must stop deriding and insulting rest, Sabbath by treating it as inferior—as a “waste” of time. It is essential to life.
With love,
Drew