Equipping young women professionals with young families to find fulfillment, contentment and joy as mothers and home makers without losing sight of who they are as women.

Volume 09, Issue 20: Rest is Logical!

I want to wrap up my reflections from EMS Hancock's book, "The Rest of Your Life: Finding Relaxation in a Non-Stop World" by expounding on how rest helps us function well.

Hancock revealed that if you deprive any animal of sleep, even for a short period, it will die. There are biological, theological, physiological and sociological needs for us to rest. In other words, rest is logical!

When we sleep at night, our resting brains are far from idle. In sleep our brains go to work consolidating memories, reviewing the events and conversations of the day and looking for creative solutions to the problems we have faced.

Every second of your life you are busy producing antibodies, repairing yourself and adapting. Removing rest damages your ability to remember and learn. You also increase your chances of stroke, heart attack, other illnesses, mess up your skin and even set yourself on a path of weight gain (EMS Hancock).

This shows that we are intricately built and fabulously designed. But we have a part to play in order to help ourselves function at our best. We need to be reminded that God gives rest to his loved ones. It is useless to work so hard from early morning until late at night, anxiously working for food to eat, for God gives rest to his loved ones - Psalms 127:2.

One of the problems we face is that we work hard and then wait for the world to grant us the space to rest. But it never comes. You are not going to magically find a time when your life slows down. Therefore, you need to deliberately practice rest now. It requires discipline and planning. If you want rest, you will have to prioritize it, diary-date-it and be intentional with it (EMS Hancock).

Rest is logical, helps us function well. However, let's not be mistaken that rest is just the absence of work. Rest is more than lapse of idle time. Last week we saw that rest isn't just a day off, but a day plugged into God himself. "Our rest isn't measured in minutes or hours, but in proximity. Sabbath is a day, but it is also a place with God - a place he makes, where he pursues us...." Paul Maxwell.

For His Glory,

Lillian Chebosi