The truth about me is that despite brief periods of impressive wholeness and holiness as it relates to living a rhythmic life, I’m still and likely always will be a hyper-scheduled person, a sign-me-up slave to the clock. Left to my own less than stellar devices, I become irritable when there is no schedule to speak of, and even more irritable when there is a schedule to speak of and somebody has the gall to disrupt it. This doesn’t bode well for someone seeking to live the Jesus pace; you don’t exactly see him consulting his daily agenda on his smartphone every sixty seconds. At times I think I’m getting better, that I’m learning to take some things in stride. But in the same way that an addict is always an addict, I recognize that as it relates to time, I’ll always be counting my sober days.
My problem stems from a little something Jesus said about what it means to be in relationship with him. Just this morning I was re-reading the piece about how he says that the people who want to be his disciples will do some very strange things, such as denying themselves and taking up their crosses daily and following him.
I barely can clear the first bar: Deny myself? Seriously? Why would I want to do that? I like myself. I like what my self wants, what it needs…and what it so often wants and needs is control. Or the illusion of control, at least.
I have a seat at my desk. I exhale, and notice that the simple process of breathing puts a tiny bit of wind in my sails. I think about that verse in Romans, where the apostle Paul says he does what he doesn’t want to do and doesn’t do what he knows he should. I don’t really want to be thinking about it, because I know it will not absolve but indict me. But think about it, I do. Specifically, I think about Eugene Peterson’s rendering, which says that one of the most perplexing things about ourselves is that we decide one way, but then act another. How I can relate.
The fuller passage in
“What I don’t understand about myself is that I decide one way, but then I act another, doing things I absolutely despise. So if I can’t be trusted to figure out what is best for myself and then do it, it becomes obvious that God’s command is necessary. But I need something more! For if I know the law but still can’t keep it, and if the power of sin within me keeps sabotaging my best intentions, I obviously need help!”
It happens so regularly that it’s predictable. The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up. I truly delight in God’s commands, but it’s pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight. Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge.
I’ve tried everything and nothing helps. I’m at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn’t that the real question? (vv. 15-17, 21-24 MSG).
The command—the “law”—I’m butting up against here lately is the one about rest. The Sabbath wasn’t a suggestion; originally it was a law. And before that, it was a practice that God himself kept. Creation: six days. Rest: day seven. Clearly he didn’t need rest; he is God, after all. No, he was modeling something here, something I am supposed to tune in to.
Yet my mind spins out of control—literally—when something interrupts my plan. I’m living too close to the margins again, which means every interruption is a step closer to boundarylessness. I don’t think this is what God had in mind.
The apostle Paul had a solution, one I’m planning to cling to as well. According to him, it turns out there is someone who can do something for him—no surprise, it’s Jesus Christ. Verse 25, speaking of Christ: “He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind, [e.g., give a rip about any agenda but my own, when I am informed that someone besides me has a need] but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally different.”
So, Jesus. It always comes back to Jesus. Wonderfully and annoyingly, it always comes back to him.
I think about his ways, about his pace. About Lazarus and how Lazarus had died and how Jesus was told that Lazarus had died and how that news totally rerouted Jesus and yet somehow, he didn’t mind. Admittedly, he didn’t rush to get there, but when did Jesus ever rush? When he did arrive, he ministered to Lazarus’s sisters, wept his own bitter tears over the loss, and then—wow—even raised the dead. He was so life-giving in his response that he literally resuscitated the one who had died.
The contrast is striking. I don’t exactly respond to interruptions this way.
I stay planted there in my desk chair and take some time to excavate the “Jesus pace.” There’s a lot for me to learn, me of the devoted bedhead-day practice, me, the one who still so often balks at the rhythmic life.
The Jesus Pace Is Rhythmic
A string of scenes from
He withdraws in order to work through tragic news, such as when he learns that his friend John the Baptist has died. He withdraws to gain insight on important decisions, such as which men to call to follow him. He withdraws so that he simply can pray. He withdraws to enjoy time with his closest companions. He withdraws as a means of teaching his disciples the unparalleled value of rest. He doesn’t wait until his mission is accomplished. He doesn’t wait until someone sanctions a few days off for him. He doesn’t even wait for an official “Sabbath” to dawn. When he senses it’s time to withdraw, he just goes.
“Jesus obeyed a deeper rhythm,” writes Muller. Absolutely, he does just that: engage, engage, engage, withdraw … engage, engage, engage, withdraw.
Rhythmic—that’s how Jesus lived. It’s how we’re invited to live too.
We’re invited to work hard and retreat frequently and trust that whatever falls through the cracks while we’re retreating will get tackled during our next working-hard time. The universe really will keep spinning, as I’ve promised you. Even in our absence, it goes around.
I myself am not entirely convinced this is true, you understand. You’d pick up on this if you observed me for a few days. But credible people I know say it is so, including Sen. Joe Liebermann, a guy pegged as unlikely to write a book on sacred rest. And yet he did. In it, he writes, “None of us needs to work every day of the week. A lot of people think they are perpetually indispensable—to their families, to their co-workers, to themselves, maybe even to the world. If I don’t go to work, my career will be ruined. If I don’t go shopping, my family will starve. If I don’t go to the gym, my body will atrophy.”
There’s that ugly fear again, that if we don’t keep all the plates spinning, they might just crash to the floor. And oh, the mess that would make. Secretly we’re afraid that if we don’t keep doing what we’ve always done, all of life will fall apart. That lady at the church near the school shooting isn’t the only one. We all think this is true.
In our better, brighter moments, we see that of course this is not the case. We see that we are not the sum of our spinning plates. We see that we desperately need to rest.
When we finally do withdraw, we can take courage from the fact that Jesus saw fit to withdraw too. Following suit, we too can leave the prevailing busyness that tends to run our lives, we can leave the “people with needs” that threaten to implode if we really do go, we can leave the stuff of preoccupation in favor of the peace we so desperately seek. We can do all these things because Jesus did them, and because he was showing us how to live. Poets say he withdrew to be reminded of his heavenly home. I say he did it to show us what a rhythmic life is like, to show us that divine rest is not an obligation but an invitation. And to show us what it’s like to respond with a heartfelt yes.
This is where I’d missed the point, just as the Jews in Jesus’ day missed the point. I’d started institutionalizing my rest, insisting that it has to start at a certain time on a certain day, each and every week, and that when something or someone got in the way of it, that diversion would equal my doom. My rest had become my lord, something I had to appease, lest I died. Jesus never saw rest this way. Remember his declaration in
To the Jewish people listening that day, shock must have registered in their hearts. They had spent their entire life orienting themselves around the rules and regulations of Sabbath observation. What on earth did Jesus mean?
He wasn’t trying to be disrespectful; he was declaring truth. They’d totally missed the point by turning God’s rest into a list of to-do’s. D.A. Carson writes, “the giving of the Sabbath law was not meant to be a burden; in fact the Sabbath was to reflect God’s compassion for his people, as well as to emphasize the character of his holiness. But this intention was forgotten in arrogance and rebellion as legalism and traditionalism grew. The true concept of the Sabbath law was proclaimed again and again by God’s prophets who stressed the covenant relationship, but people were unwilling to listen. Instead of understanding it to be their privilege to rest on Sabbath, they viewed it as deprivation; instead of recognizing their opportunity to commune with God, they saw only inconvenience and hardship. Rather than discovering freedom to worship, they felt in bondage to a law, and instead of grasping the idea of renewal of their covenant relationship to God, they experienced the tragedy of legalism.”
Jesus wasn’t into legalism, evidenced in the way he “worked” on various Sabbaths—picking wheat, healing disfigured people—and also in the way he rested when people thought he should work. What has always been most notable about Jesus’ voluntary withdrawals is not that he rested, but when he chose to rest. He withdrew to rest when people still needed him, and also when his ego would have been tempted to stay. Jesus didn’t merely rest when rest was expected; he also rested when he was at the top of his game.
The Jesus Pace Is Relational
To that issue of differentiating when it’s time to engage and when it’s time to withdraw, I notice that Jesus did another thing really well: He listened to the voice of his Father, and he let those divine whispers guide his life.
This, of course, is what all that “withdrawing” was about. It was about carving out time to pray, to commune, to lean in.
I was trying to explain this idea recently to a good friend and said, “It’s like this: what if Pam and I invited you and your husband over for dinner, and then, as soon as you arrived, she and I jumped into the car and headed out to run a few errands? You’re left standing there on our front porch, holding the hospitable bouquet of flowers you brought, wondering why you got ditched by your dinner hosts.”
You and I would be flabbergasted by that turn of events too, wouldn’t we? If you get invited to someone’s home for dinner, you kind of expect that someone to be there. You expect to have quality time with them, you expect to enjoy unhurried conversation with them, you expect for things being centered on the get-together at hand.
This is exactly how Jesus treated God. His times of withdrawal, of divine rest, weren’t patronizing scraps tossed God’s way; they were intentional and intimate moments of connection, during which nothing else caught Jesus’ eye. “What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything,” writes Jan Johnson. “It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you will do with your evening, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.”
Jesus was in love with his Father. And that one great love drove everything he did—and did not—do…The most important thing, according to the rhythms of Jesus, was carving out time for God. But really, what time-pressed professional wants to do that? Dan had spent decades lauding efficiency, mandating quick fixes, expecting expediency from all of life. And yet now he faced a dilemma that couldn’t be quick-fixed or git-er-done healed.
Intimacy happens in private, something Jesus knew all too well. This is why he’d scurry away from the crowds and seek out a mountainside where he could be alone.
The Jesus Pace Is Resolute
You could make a case that I have no business pursuing the third part of Jesus’ pace until I pass the test on parts one and two. But because I’m a glutton for punishment, I stay at my desk, continue to excavate his lifestyle, keep on jotting down lessons I’ve yet to learn. Here’s the final one I note: There’s a resoluteness to his rest.
I’m reading in the Book of
So, the storm is surging all around, the disciples are scared out of their minds, and there is Jesus, asleep in the stern. Which infuriates his otherwise happy followers. “Don’t you care that we’re going to drown?” they scream, even as Jesus snoozes away.
Finally, he wakes up, and he’s simply stunned by their lack of faith. “Why are you such cowards?” he asks, taking in the wide eyed and white-knuckled bunch. He surmises the situation and without any pomp and circumstance shouts, “Quiet! Settle down!”
He was talking not to the disciples but, astonishingly, to the wind and the waves. More astonishing still: the wind and the waves complied. Mark 4:39 says, “The wind ran out of breath; the sea became smooth as glass.”
Wow.
Such confidence. Such resoluteness. Such an awareness of kingdom-come.
The disciples now stagger around not from seasickness, but from sheer awe in the face of this man. “Who is this, anyway?” they ask, according to verse 41. “Wind and sea at his beck and call!”
Try, all of creation at his beck and call.
Here’s the thing we tend to miss: When Jesus declared peace and quiet, he wasn’t declaring it over a single storm; he was declaring it over an entire kingdom. He was saying, in effect, “Peace and quiet will one day reign—everywhere, at all times. At some point, the lion will lay down with the lamb; predator and prey will live at peace.”
Interestingly, the Bible never says that the storm that day was caused by Satan. Most likely, it was a naturally occurring storm. Still today, sudden storms can rise up over the mountains of that very region and quickly throw into massive turbulence the otherwise mild Sea of Galilee. This wasn’t Satan trying to kill them, then; this was the natural order of things. And what Jesus was saying is that yes, this is normal and natural for now, but a new normal is on its way in. When my kingdom settles in, all things will be at rest.
What’s more, by accusing them of being cowards he was indicating to his disciples that an unyielding, unwavering confidence could be theirs instead, that they could enjoy that state of rest whenever they choose. This is something they didn’t know, and something we have a hard time believing still today. Peace is ours for the taking! It’s always knocking on the door; we simply have to open the door and invite it in. We have to be open for business, remember? This is such a fantastic goal. I was starting to understand why Jesus chose to live the way he did. Pace matters. The right pace matters. Perhaps there was hope for me yet.
1 See Luke 9:23.
Excerpted from Addicted to Busy: Recovery for the Rushed Soul by Brady Boyd.
