The Importance of Rest

It's so easy to forget to rest sometimes.

I've been working pretty hard lately. Starting your own company involves so many unexpected little things, and its all on your shoulders. I honestly couldn't really afford to take a whole day off yesterday, but I was starting to see those warning signs that my parents have taught me to look for. I was restless, irritable, and swimming in a sea of "how on earth am I going to get all of this done?"

So I took a break. I sat on the couch all day with the TV on in the background playing poker. The Indiana Jones trilogy was playing all day on Spike. I wrote some emails to friends that I've been wanting to write for weeks. I did some laundry and straightened up my tornado zone of a room. I even dozed off for 30 minutes or so at one point. It was perfect.

Now that I have more that I'm responsible for, I'm beginning to understand what an important and even spiritual thing rest is. Because every time I started to hear that little voice urging me to at least get something productive done, I reminded it that God is my own sufficiency, that He has provided incredible solutions and answers along the way, and that He will keep doing that as long as I keep the right perspective and don't try to take the burden of everything on my own shoulders.

Taking yesterday off was a very tangible expression of surrender, an acknowledgment that if left to myself I'll run myself into the ground and die without accomplishing anything of lasting importance anyway.

And on top of that, it just felt really really good.