Remember Him In Rest

And on the seventh day God rested. We set aside the seventh day to rest from our labors and Remember our Heavenly Father. I’ve always thought that we are supposed to rest so that we are not distracted from remembering God, like the rest is a necessary prerequisite but is entirely incidental to the act of remembering. But God hallowed the Sabbath as a day of rest in remembrance of His rest from His labors. We are not meant only to remember God, but to remember specifically the rest that He took. That is why we set aside a day of rest so that we can remember God and His rest while we are taking our rest. Rest is an important part of our journey through life. And I’m not just talking about how we need to get enough sleep to stay healthy. God created the world and everything in it, but then He rested. After He perfectly set up the ideal conditions for life to grow and flourish, He then took a step back. Although God has the ability to micromanage every sprouting seed and drifting cloud and the choices and outcomes of every single one of His children from moment to moment, that is not how He works. God works exactly as hard as He needs to but not one single ounce of effort more. He created this world to see what we could make of it, and in order to give us that chance, He had to rest. He had to allow us the freedom and the responsibility to do our own work. This is not to say that God hasn’t been actively engaged in all sorts of labors throughout all of human history. But the point I’m trying to make is that God gave us a pattern. After we have done all we can do, after we have planned for every outcome we can think of, after we have worked as hard as we possibly can to make sure that our project has every chance of success, then we have to rest. We have to let our efforts stand on their own and see what the rest of the world makes of them. Maybe it will be brilliant. Maybe it will all fail horribly. But when we follow our Heavenly Father’s example and give ourselves that opportunity to rest and to wait and see, then we don’t have to get so wrapped up in the outcomes of our labors. Whether we triumph or crash and burn, our only options really are to go back to work - either on to the next (hopefully) great thing, or to sweep aside the wreckage and try again. God puts an enormous amount of faith and hope in us by choosing to rest and place our futures in our own often feeble and misguided hands. We ought to put the same kind of trust in Him by resting when we have gotten to the end of our labors and putting the fate of our efforts in His mighty hands. Whether it’s one day in seven or one minute in seven, when we choose to rest, we are giving ourselves the opportunity to remember both God and the rest that He took. We don’t have to wait for the Sabbath day to remember Him. Every spare second we get to rest is a chance to stand still and know that God is, and that He loves us and that He will do everything in His power to set things up perfectly, but then He will step back and let us take a crack at it.