A Face-Kicking Kind of Rest
Are you prone to anything? When you think of your life, do you have involuntary tendencies? For me, I have a cursed mouth. Just recently at our church’s Disciple Now Retreat I was playing a game with a group of students, and in all the jovial movements and hormone driven flinging of teenage limbs I was elbowed in the mouth. When I was a baby I knocked my highchair over and landed on my face, forcing my juvenile mouth bones through the front of my lip. I don’t remember this, but my mother told me the story.
Years later, in a story I do remember, my father was coaching my baseball team. During his term he decided one day we would practice pop-fly’s and like a predictable sitcom, the baseball eclipsed the sun, tricked me to believe that I could fix my gaze on its vault, moved out of the path of shading my eyes from the sun, and commenced to give me the second hardest kiss of my life (second only to the highchair face-fall). In the same place where my young innocent flesh had been punctured before, my teeth passed through my lip like they were old acquaintances.
“‘Your toothpaste!’ -Mom”
If body ailments aren’t your thing, jump to the seventh paragraph. For those of you who enjoy Dr. Pimplepopper and various youTube Fail videos, keep reading. As I grew older I found myself taking after my mother—much of my late teen and current young adulthood has been filled with mouth ulcers. Very rarely do I have none in my mouth, and on average I carry with me 7 mouth sores. After many grueling and puzzling years filled with zalactin bottles, numbing solution, and hours spent searching for base suffused bottled water, my mother announced that she knew why I was suffering from mini mouth volcanoes—“your toothpaste!” For years my pearly whites and I used Crest Whitening 3D tooth paste (I don’t know what is 2D about toothpaste…but apparently Crest needed to specify) but upon her theory, I abandoned the tube and swapped over to a Dollar Store brand and wham! My ulcers reduced in half! Now I can live happy ever after…
During the time I have been plagued by ulcers I experienced the worst of mouth pain when I entered into my braced teenaged years. Along with having a mouth prone to creating it’s own problems, I acquired tons of tiny, metal, food storage units glued to my teeth, eager to cut everything in my mouth. All of the time. In the middle of my braces timeline I had a run-in with a friend named Carson—a guy who I’m pretty sure had an addiction to pain. One of my life mottos is “no pain, no pain,” and for the most part I was able to live this out around Carson, but one day our paths crossed.
Growing up on the lake, my friends and I were blessed with parents who would pull us around at high velocities behind their boat as we held on to ropes or tubes. One of our favorite things to do was pull two tubes and four people behind the boat, and declare war between the two parties. There are two roles in this game, the inside people were the fighters for the team; they would punch, push, flip, and throw water in the opponents’ faces. The outside members were the steerers of the tubes. I was partnered with Carson, me on the inside and him steering.
Mid war and post abandoned, Carson decided to stand up on the tube and launch himself toward the opposing team, latch onto one of the members, and rip him off the tube—all in one fluid motion. In it’s own regard it was quite a feat. A beautiful victory. However, in the process of leveraging himself off of the tube, he found an extra source of forward propulsion by kicking me in the face. This was probably the winning factor. Actually. It was the winning factor. Essentially I had defeated the other team. It was quite a feat. A bloody victory. A victory that not only won us the game, but also embedded my braces into my skin. I had to pry the lip off of my braces afterward, and at that time I would have been okay with a hundred ulcers in my mouth or at least 7 pop fly kisses.
“Our rhythms of life, the paces we set for ourselves, our friends, our kids, is often steeped with some sort of restlessness and have the propensity to be unsustainable.”
Whether it is our spiritual state, school state, work state, take-the-kids-to-practice state, or friend-spending state, I believe we as humans have a tendency, an involuntary tendency, toward restlessness. Our rhythms of life, the paces we set for ourselves, our friends, our kids, is often steeped with some sort of restlessness and have the propensity to be unsustainable. The common way that everyone strives to avoid or overcome restlessness is through picking and choosing how we structure our rhythms. My fear for most of us is that we, in setting our pace, and more specifically our spiritual pace, become like an unopened chip bag from Subway, puffed up with all air and little substance.
Our spiritual rhythm is what guides and forecasts our spiritual rest. Absolutely, God can meet us where we are when we run off or misuse our time, but those meetings work more like reminders, not rest.
From the beginning God set up a pace for creation. If you’re unfamiliar with life’s original rhythms, see Genesis 1-2. In this stride, we see God creating for 6 days and resting for 1—the pattern of a week. Some interesting concepts are told here for mankind, who entered the scene on day 7.
“From the beginning God set up a pace for creation.”
One, I think it’s a good reminder of, “hey, God has been working on the scene way before you arrived.” When we enter into relationships and walking in step with others, we must acknowledge that God has been working in their life way before we showed up. Two, God’s timing in the creation of man is dope. Man entered on day 6, and creation rested on day 7. Did you catch it? The first full day man is living in creation is spent in rest. He didn’t immediately start working, his primary focus in being a part of creation was resting with the creator. Three, the implications of the time we entered the scene is important. We ought to “work from our rest, not rest from our work.*” From the day we were created, our first role was to rest and then enter into our work. God works then rests, we share that rest with him that we might know him—his thoughts, plans, desires—then we go, labor, produce fruit, and come back to rest.
If we do life resting from our work, we will always be restless. If we work from resting in the Lord, there will be a mighty harvest.
The past seven weeks in youth group we have been going over rest and spiritual rhythm, but as I’ve talked with students about their spiritual rhythms, it seems like I’ve done a poor job explaining it. What does a spiritual rhythm look like? Often students answer with, waking up to read your bible, pray more, witness more, etc. And yes, these are great answers and this is what the Lord uses. However, in our walking with the Lord, he uses these in relation to each other, and it is this relation that creates the rhythm in our pursuit of sanctification**.
“Rest, Grow, Produce, Prune, Repeat.”
John 15, Jesus describes himself as the vine, the Father as the vinedresser, and we as the branches. If you know anything about plants, you know that there are different seasons of plant care. Starting off, you prune a plant to allow the root structure to take hold (this way the plant doesn’t become top-heavy with all the fruits/branches and de-root itself). After some years of pruning, the farmer will allow the plant to produce fruit, but continues to prune it that it not be overwhelmed and malnourished in producing fruit constantly. Our lives are like this; we have seasons for rest, growth, fruit producing, and pruning (in that order).
Growth and fruit producing are fun for Christians and are natural for plants…it’s what they do. Pruning and rest on the other hand are often painful and incredibly unnatural. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been finding more and more that seeking righteousness is quite uncomfortable. Yes, it feels nice and is easy to pick up a hitchhiker, take them an hour out of your way to get them where they need to go, and give them $80 to pay for a hotel room, but it feels awful being nice to my co-workers some days. Or knowing you are in the right in a situation, but take a loss, because you are more concerned about loving the person (and being patient and kind) more so than you are being right. It’s like getting kicked in the face while having a tubing war on a bright, sunny, weekend at the lake. All you want is to have fun and straight teeth, but someone else’s foot has different plans.
But despite the subtle or severe pains from braces; straight teeth are always worth it. Despite the subtle or severe pains from spiritual braces; looking like Jesus is always worth it.
“Despite the subtle or severe pains from spiritual braces; looking like Jesus is always worth it.”
Practically, what does what we’ve been discussing look like? I am an avid alarm snoozer. Retro, digital, or cellular, I have no problem turning it off. In fact, I snooze my alarm for 1/24 of my day. When I do this what am I saying spiritually? “I’m tired Jesus, and I believe that these 6, nine minute, interrupted naps will give me more rest than pursuing you through your word, prayer, and meditation.” Along the conviction train, I have been finding that my daily, weekly, and monthly schedule run the same vein.
Can I ask you a question? When was the last time you scheduled your calendar around times you were going to rest in God (Or grow, produce, or prune for that matter)? What day of the week do you have your sabbath? What times during the day do you have a set meeting with the Lord? What time of the month do you dedicate to prayer and bible study in solitude? I ask, not be a pharisee, but to be practical. I know I schedule everything else out. If we are prone to wander from a spiritual stability, wouldn’t the first thing we do regarding our spiritual wellbeing be write in on our calendar? In Sharpie.
It’s obvious that our daily rhythms shape our daily lives; our spiritual rhythms don’t just shape our lives like braces on teeth though. Our spiritual pace sanctifies and sustains life. Resting in the Lord is a means of sanctification. Growing in the Lord is sanctification. Producing is sanctification. Pruning is sanctification. If we seek to keep the Spirit in our rhythms, our rhythms keep the Spirit in our seeking.
Here’s to both seeking the Lord through our rhythms of life and straight teeth!
*Shout out to Mike Breen and the 3DM Team in their book Building a Discipling Culture! They are incredibly wise, I have been influenced greatly by them, and I would definitely recommend their book. Some of what I have written today has been influenced by the Rhythm of Life section (p. 85-97)
**Christianese term simply meaning “changing one degree of godliness at a time to look more like Jesus)
***Huge passages I have been pulling from and being convicted from with this post are 1 Peter 3:8-17, 4:1-6; and James 1: 2-18.