I’d fallen into the busy trap. I’m an achiever. Some might say an overachiever. In my immature bent toward achieving, I didn’t stop. Ever. Stopping was a missed opportunity for accomplishment. “Rest is for the weak or the dead,” I would say to myself. Not surprisingly, when your heart is saying things like that, your hands won’t stop finding things to do — things like painting your baseboards after midnight.

It’s one o’clock in the morning, and I’m painting my hallway baseboards.

These hyper self-aware words repeat in my head as my hands cut a clean line of white paint at far too late an hour. You probably don’t paint that late at night. Normally, neither do I. But it was a relentlessly busy season, and I was convinced that this was the best and only time to do it.

I wasn’t happy to be that busy, of course — to have just bought a home which was built only a decade or two after the Civil War ended, to be remodeling it, to have a baby that refused to sleep, and to have a demanding job. In fact, I was angry.

I’d fallen into the busy trap. I’m an achiever. Some might say an overachiever. In my immature bent toward achieving, I didn’t stop. Ever. Stopping was a missed opportunity for accomplishment. “Rest is for the weak or the dead,” I would say to myself. Not surprisingly, when your heart is saying things like that, your hands won’t stop finding things to do — things like painting your baseboards after midnight.

The busy trap is the self-defeating spiral of nonstop action that feeds on the belief that restfulness is weakness. But rest is not weakness. Rest is an irreducible ingredient for the life that enjoys God.

What Restlessness Forgets

Have you ever stopped to wonder why, exactly, God would get so upset when Israel forgot to practice the Sabbath? In Ezekiel 20, the prophet is going after Israel for this very thing. There, God says, “I gave them my Sabbaths, as a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am the Lord who sanctifies them” (Ezekiel 20:12). Yet, Israel refused to rest.

By forgetting to stop, we forget God. Restlessness — the refusal to lay down our work so we can open our arms to God — means that our busy hands are always full. This robs God of glory — his weighty significance in our lives. Holy time given to a holy God makes us more wholly aware that we are not gods — we neither create nor save ourselves. God does. If we won’t stop to experience the glory of God in rest, we won’t be able to glorify him in work either.

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