GOD'S SABBATH time of rest

I don’t remember when I started thinking about rest, or why I became so drawn to finding it. Maybe because it seemed to promise relief from the exhausting and crushing weight of despair I often felt. Maybe because I sensed - even as an atheist - nature’s greatest beauty was not in its visible designs and colors and alluring smells but in its absolute presence that proves a naked confidence, a daring to be exactly all that it is without the least explaining or excusing. This shameless confidence-in-being is the invisible beauty in all existence that compares to the human experience of trust embraced by trustworthiness, like a baby sleeping securely in her mother’s arms. Nature’s inviolable trust that abandons its every atom to being is - when translated as a personal dynamic - an immersion in rest. In this encompassing rest, there is not the slightest unsettling separation between what is and what should be, not the least straining to get anything that is not already entirely given. All nature, all creation perfectly fits existence with a certainty of being that needs nothing more or different to fully be. Existence in its essential presence is at perfect peace, nurtured and kept in perfect rest

At the sustaining level of existence, everything is held in rest. No striving or work is possible to bring us to where we already most certainly are or to gain what is already fully given. We experience this absolute grounding of reality as the givens of life, the assumptions we all know and live by. There is no apparent need to learn what we think we already know or give attention to what our senses can’t perceive, so we turn instead to things that more naturally engage our attention and senses. Who could blame us for preferring things that fascinate and invite our participation to a presence that is insensible, inaccessible and unchanging? Who would choose to enjoy a garden just for being there instead of delighting in its beautiful, varied and ephemeral flowers? But when we consider and pause near the places of our being where the givens rest and sense in them a trustworthy Giver, we discern a dimension of life whose faintest appearing is most precious even though it is most often ignored; a grounding that gives new meaning to living even though it has always been; a joy that fills life with abundance even though it is rarely sought or even acknowledged as real. God’s creation rests on a most fertile ground that can never be tampered with or violated. God gives our senses things we can perceive to enjoy and define as we want, but we can never touch the substance of His enduring and holy ways. It is in God’s holy ways that we discover His rest, the blessing of His Sabbath

God’s rest is evident in all creation. I believe it is because His rest is so essential to the place and purpose of everything that it is rendered invisible to us. We look straight through it’s vital presence and proceed in the life we are busy paving. But God’s reliable rest endures and sustains, whether or not we acknowledge it. We first read in the Bible of God’s rest in His completing creation and later in His forth commandment to Israel. The full revelation of God’s rest is Jesus, Lord of the Sabbath, who reveals God’s rest as most personal and sacrificial. Jesus is our perfect rest in God, a solid anchor who assures our personal rest by giving us His life

This blog is from a book I am writing called GOD’S SABBATH time of rest. The first blog posting is the book’s Contents and will be followed every other week with consecutive sections from this book. Please email me any thoughts or questions on the Contact page