“It’s a good thing they told everyone to work from home, because some people will go into the office no matter what, just to prove they can.”
This comment was made by a good friend of mine from university who had just visited one of our mutual friends in Silicon Valley, the tech hub of America.
If you know anything about Silicon Valley, you know it’s a culture of work for the sake of work - where “hustle” is a means of finding one’s identity, and productivity is the sole metric that determines a person’s value. The little bit of spirituality that does exist there is mostly yoga and meditation as a tool for “recharging,” because even in Silicon Valley, people realize they have limits.
I bring this up because we live in Kitchener-Waterloo, a city often touted as “Silicon Valley of the North.” It’s a city full of established tech giants, startups, and brilliant students looking to forge their paths.
Here, we allow ourselves to believe many of the same stories, the ones that tell us that a full schedule is normal, that you’re as important as your job title, and as valuable as your yearly salary. We even chase productivity in our leisure time! We fill our evenings working on “side hustles,” go to the gym to pursue our fitness goals, or go to networking events to advance our careers.
I’m as guilty of this as anyone else - I fill my schedule with so many commitments and always feel frustrated that I don’t really have time to do all of them, let alone rest.
But right now, I don’t have a choice in the matter. Right now, I feel like I understand Psalm 23 more fully.
Let's look at verses 2 & 3:
He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters.
He restores my soul.
He leads me in paths of righteousness
for his name's sake.
He makes me lie down in green pastures.
Just as a shepherd guides their sheep to the place that will provide them safety and nourishment, God instructs us to rest for our own good. It’s why he instituted the Sabbath and instructed us to keep it Holy. We need time and space to pray, to meditate on God’s word, to reflect deeply on our lives, and to intentionally cultivate habits that are good for our soul. We need to give our bodies the sleep and nourishment that they need to be healthy. We need to love, serve, and spend time with those that God has placed in our lives.
If you are like me and finding yourself facing forced rest, I want to encourage you to first and foremost...
...receive it!
Be grateful for the "green pastures" God promises us and see it as a time for God to interrupt the false stories that our busy lives tell us.
When we don’t make space for rest, for the word, and for prayer, we don’t allow room for God’s voice to speak. We often allow ourselves to be swept along by the busy current of our lives, but God graciously invites us to lie down in the safety of a green pasture and find refreshment in Him. If we don’t carve out space for Jesus, how can we be led in the paths of righteousness?
When all of this is over, let’s not go back to “normal"! For many of us right now, our “normal” is an unhealthy, self-centered idolatry. Let’s stop and learn to value the green pastures and still waters again, because it is there that God will build us up for His glory.
-Sam