Matthew 11:28 - 30
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
When I first started fasting years ago as a spiritual practice, I found it strange that I so often became irritable when I went without food for a period of time. I was at a beginning place in my own spiritual awareness, and assumed that a spiritual discipline would yield results that looked pious. I thought fasting would give me a holy aura, that the road to such holiness would be filled with bliss.
What I found instead was that being hungry for long periods of time really ticked me off. Junk hidden deep within me would rise to the surface. Little things would set me off.
I soon noticed that not only did my disposition and behavior change when I was hungry, but the same dispositions and behaviors rose up within me when I was overly angry, and when I was lonely, and when I was tired. In the early 1990's I was telling a friend about this self-discovery, about what I'd seen in my growing self-awareness. He had been involved in a 12-step program for a few years, and immediately said, "Yeah, that's H.A.L.T.: Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired. Those are the times when you're most vulnerable."
I know now that addicts -- all of us, in other words -- are most vulnerable in those four states of being.
As I get older, it seems like I experience "Tired" more than the other three. In my younger years, I found sleep to be a waste of time, a bad use of the short span of time we have to live on the planet. Now that I'm older, naps are precious, and days given to sleeping a little later in the morning are absolute gifts from God!
I experience "Tired" in different ways. There are times when my body is worn out from being physical taxed. When possible, those times call for a nap, or for a late morning of sleep.
There are times when I'm emotionally and physically weary from medical procedures and treatments. I rest when I can and try to come into some equilibrium.
In some life-situations I simply run out of energy. There are times when I've dealt with some situation all I can, when I've given a person, a relationship or a task all the energy I can muster. I simply get tired underneath it.
The most consistently wearying times for me, though, come when I'm running so fast or at such a pace, that I have nothing left in my tank. The hours and days when I lunge from event to event, when I'm in a mode of constantly preparing for the "next big thing," I feel like I have little inner reservoir from which to draw. My resources are low. When I'm spiritually, emotionally and physically depleted, I'm vulnerable.
The rest Jesus promised is "rest for your souls." It may or may not include physical rest (most often it does . . . we are whole persons, not fragmented into various pieces).
This rest comes from being rooted in the Source of all life. Rest also comes when we live into different life-patterns or rhythms. Weariness comes when we get jerked around by the oughts and shoulds that find us in the external world. We lose our center. We capitulate to expectation and demand without a sense of who we truly are and why God created us.
Personally, I believe a lot of our running about in madness is the result of our not knowing our true name, the name that most deeply connects us to God and gives us our truest identity.
But different rhythms mean that we move easily between silence, solitude and engagement. It means that we simplify our lives. It means that we are clear with ourselves about the difference between what we need and what we want. We find both the inner freedom to say, "Yes," and the inner freedom to say, "No."
During Advent, both John the Baptist and the Prophet Isaiah have encouraged us to level valleys and mountains, to make curved paths straight. In other words, they've encouraged us to balance, to the middle, to the path that is steady and reliable.
It is the path that we walk when we live from the inside-out. The person consistently on the move, running from task to obligation, will have little sense of Jesus' words.
"Come to me all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."
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