“He leads me beside quiet waters.”
We had a guest pastor yesterday in church. His focus was on the 23rd Psalm and Jesus as the Good Shepherd. He went on to say that busyness is the great enemy of spiritual life today and that everyone is hardwired with a different capacity for busyness. I never really thought about it that way, but it made sense.
His point was that some people can stay very busy, yet still have the ability to rest and pray and listen to God. Some people only require six hours of sleep each night. But, some of us require eight and when we over schedule ourselves and don’t leave ourselves enough time for rest and prayer, our spirituality suffers. Our relationship with God suffers.
That means that to the human eye some people will always appear more productive than others. But, therein lies the rub. We aren’t supposed to concern ourselves with how we look to others when we are following the will of God. Will I look lazy if I don’t attend that event? Will it look like I don’t care or I’m not a good Christian?
These are questions that we should permanently remove from our internal dialog with ourselves. God made each one of us wonderfully different. We’re not all wired the same, by design. We are all originals. The only thing we are called to do is to follow God. If He calls us to do something, then we should do it. Caring about how it looks to others shouldn’t really cross our minds.
I’m always amazed at how the Bible can speak to me right where I am at any given moment and Psalm 23:2 really caught my attention today. “He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters.”
Did you notice that it didn’t say, “He asks us to slow down and rest.”? Nope, it says. “He makes me lie down.” Rest is mandatory. I also took note that it didn’t say to lie down on a couch in front of a noisy television or while I’m playing on my phone. I know those things weren’t invented when this beautiful book was written, but I think you get the point. He makes me rest in green pastures and leads me beside quiet waters; not loud rushing waterfalls.
It’s a peaceful picture. It’s a picture of our God acknowledging that we need to rest and providing a beautiful, peaceful setting for us to do so. Because what comes next is, “he restores my soul.”
So, we have a Biblical example here of the importance of rest and being surrounded by some type of peaceful setting in order for our souls to be restored and ready to work.
Once we have all pondered that, we should ask ourselves, how busy we are and are we too busy? Everyone’s answer will be different and everyone will have a different degree of acceptable busyness. Of course, there are seasons when we will be slammed, and that’s okay. But, if we find ourselves exhausted all of the time and we never have time to pray, or we have that constant tension in our shoulders, or the daily headache that never seems to go away, perhaps we have reached our capacity for busyness and we need to dial it back.
We weren’t meant to be constantly stressed and exhausted. We can’t grow that way and we can’t experience God’s plan for us that way. Rest and restoration is supposed to be a part of our lives. If we want to be all that God has designed us to be, we really need to embrace that concept.
The more I think about it; the more I like it. How busy are you?
Have an awesome day!
Wendy 🙂