As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more comfortable with my own company. There are times when my husband has to travel, and once that front door is locked on a Friday evening, I’m not seen for days.
I think my best friend uses my barrage of TikToks and Instagram reels as proof of life. I enjoy these moments of quiet and stillness because they allow me to decompress, especially after a demanding week at work. Lately, however, I’m noticing that the quiet times aren’t the same as they once were.
I’m realizing now in the quiet moments that I’m reflecting more on my interactions during the day, the thoughts I entertained, and the emotions I allowed in the driver's seat. This alone is bothersome, but what I’ve found is that introspection has made me even more resistant to quiet moments. Let me be clear. I HATE this!
As I’m writing this, I’ve already made a call to someone to apologize for my delivery during an exchange, even though they didn’t tell me they were offended. Again, I HATE this!
While this is one of the most loathsome parts of maturing spiritually, I recognize its importance, especially as I prepare to walk and live out everything God has called me to.
The Illusion of Rest
We think that rest means no activity or productivity. We think it means being in a perpetual state of vacation and mindless wandering. However, we’ve come to understand that work still happens while we’re at rest, but it’s a focus on the work we’ve been called to and not work we manufacture.
But I think there’s a different kind of rest we’re being called to. It focuses on our heart posture but only requires us to receive, not produce. I think this is the rest the enemy fights with all his might.
The reason this rest is so fiercely opposed is that it’s not just focused on restoring our bodies but exposing our hearts. Both our flesh and the enemy resist this kind of illumination because it removes their cover.
As the younger people say (cause my mommy says only clothes get old), let me cook. There’s a reason we can sleep for eight or more hours and wake up tired. There’s a reason we fall asleep from exhaustion but wake up only a few hours into our sleep. During our sleep, we’re not only undergoing physiological changes but psychological ones.
Things that happened throughout the day or week can subtly weave their way into our dreams, bringing with them a level of torment we thought we could escape.
We entertain the illusion of rest when we think of it as scrolling on social media endlessly for hours or being engaged in some other activity that doesn’t require much brain capacity. Truthfully, both behaviors and many others like them operate as hindrances to the rest we truly need.
What Is This Rest and Why Is It Important
Interestingly, this rest doesn’t focus on minimizing self-effort, but instead it’s concerned with exposing the condition of our hearts that exist behind our actions.
This is the rest that invites us to sit quietly and allow the Holy Spirit to search our inner thoughts and emotions to reveal their root.
Roots are a largely hidden, intricate network that provide a tree with all the resources needed to produce fruit. It’s the fruit that tells us the type of tree it is, and the fruit allows us to measure quality.
The challenge with many of us is that we’ve learned to mask our feelings while also feeling without action. There’s a dangerous belief that as long as we don’t act on those feelings, they don’t need to be addressed. This is the deception the enemy capitalizes on.
He doesn’t always care if we act on our feelings. Matter of fact, I think he prefers that we don’t. Why? So that we fall into the trap of pride and consider ourselves ultra-disciplined while we quietly nurse emotions and thoughts that will inevitably seep into and poison everything around us.
Areas left unaddressed remain broken, and this brokenness shapes our words, relationships, and eventually the way we see God.
This rest isn’t an audit of our thoughts or behavior; those are just symptoms. This rest invites us to surrender our resistance to understanding the ‘why’ behind our ‘what’.
We cannot move forward if we’re not prepared to address the things that hold us back.
You may say that it’s not an issue if you don’t act on your thoughts or feelings. I say, Jesus would disagree. Matthew 5:21-22 and 5:27-28 reveal this principle clearly. Jeremiah 17:9-10 paints a clear picture of the nature of our hearts, while Proverbs 4:23 and 16:2 explain the importance of guarding while allowing God to search it.
These passages weren’t written to condemn us for what exists within our hearts but to convince us that true change requires more than behavior modification. The heart is where transformation begins because God never exposes what He doesn’t also intend to heal.
Why We Resist This Invitation
We resist this kind of rest because we still believe that changing is our responsibility alone. We see introspection as a highlighting of one more thing we need to address to be ‘good enough’, especially in a world that already judges us by the things they can see.
We fight it because we still fear being naked even when we’re alone. We’ve built illusions of ourselves that are inspired by what we do. But we’ve measured the quality of our character by the things we feign discipline with, instead of by the contents of our heart.
We often assume Jesus exposes our hearts because He’s disappointed in us, but the opposite is true.
He exposes what enslaves because He intends to free us from it, but our part is to surrender.
He highlights every hidden fear, resentment, bitterness, insecurity, and false belief because He knows only His grace can heal them.
But He’s not a cruel surgeon. He requires surrender.
This rest isn’t about becoming more aware of our brokenness but of His sufficiency. This is the invitation to rest.