Off-Brand Living: Rest

In the last blog we talked about what I’m referring to as “off-brand living.” If you haven’t read it already, you can read it here. We are going to continue that thought today and talk about rest.

How many of you have found yourself in this scenario: you are tired. It’s been a long day. You are spent in pretty much every way. You don’t really want to just go to bed - mostly because it’s like 6 pm; yet the thought of doing anything on your ever increasing to-do list is threatening to completely overwhelm you. You think to yourself: “I just need some rest.” So what do you do? You recline on the couch and turn the tv on. You spend the next hour sitting, sometimes looking at your phone and sometimes looking at the tv. Never really fully engaged with either one, and never really doing anything either. By the time you check the clock, you’ve “rested” the night away, yet you feel no different than when you first sat down. You still feel tired, drained and overwhelmed. If anything, you feel a little ripped off and like you need to repeat the whole process again because somehow in all your resting, you never rested. 

The scene I just described has been the story of far too many of my nights over the years. I would enter my home from a long day, or finally have some time to myself at the end of a long day, and seek respite in watching tv, or mindlessly scrolling through various social media platforms, thinking that it would give me the mental break and refreshing I needed only to find myself feeling like I needed a rest from my rest. Over the years, this had really become a pattern for me. It got to a point where I would spend more time than I care to admit looking for the opportunities in the day where I could “veg out.” Then I would spend a long time vegging out and still feel stressed and overwhelmed and think, “Well I must need to do it some more because it didn’t really work.” 

I believe my problem for all those years, and the problem that several of us find ourselves in, isn’t the need or desire for rest. For those of us who study the Bible, we know that rest is a good thing and something that is promised to believers more than once in Scripture. The problem is - we have believed the lie that watching tv, scrolling through social media, or messing with your phone in general is rest. We’ve settled for a counterfeit and then wondered why in all our resting, we never feel rested. 

To be clear, I am not saying any of those things are bad things. Television, social media, smartphones, or the internet are not innately bad things. They become vices to us when we start to use them with the expectation to be filled by them. I am not casting judgement on any of these things or saying believers shouldn’t use them. What I am saying is this: let’s stop calling the use of these things “rest.” 

The truth is, there is only one source for true rest. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28 ESV) To believe anything else, is to believe a lie. No really. Watching tv is “off-brand” rest. Sure it might be enjoyable. It might be no effort. It might cause you to not be working for awhile. But when the show is over, you are still left that pang of hunger, that dryness, that sense of uneasiness, and if you aren’t it isn’t because tv actually solved something; tv just caused you to become numb to your reality. I know this might seem extreme, but I’m speaking as one who knows and is still finding out the truth. If “Netflix and chill” was a sport, I would be on the Olympic team. My thumb muscles are off the charts from all my social media scrolling. Yet, I can honestly say that while I may have had an enjoyable experience with these things, I’ve never felt recharged by them. 

So how do we get the real thing? Real rest? Let’s look at Matthew 11:28 again. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” As far as I can tell by looking at this verse there are two criteria we need to meet in order to enter real rest. 

1. Labor or be heavy laden.

I think all this describes all people at some point. We find ourselves working and toiling, sometimes in our occupations, sometimes in relationships, sometimes internally and not feeling like we are gaining ground. Daily life comes with infinitely many ways to feel burdened or weight down. In my experience, most weighed down people have done or are doing something to try to ease the burden, but it’s usually not doing much to help. 

That leads to the next criteria.

1. Come to Jesus.

As trite and Hallmark-y as that sounds, it’s that simple. It’s not complicated, but it might be costly. If you choose to read your Bible instead of turn on the tv, you’ll find rest. If you pray instead of checking Facebook, you’ll find rest. If you turn every other distraction off for 10 minutes and sit in your house and just say, “God, I’m here right now to find You,” and then just be quiet, you will find rest. Yeah, you might miss a phone call. You can bet someone will post something hilarious and you won’t see it until 2 hours later. Inevitably, the main two characters of the show that are in love but never can quite get the timing right, will finally get together in the episode you miss. Despite all that friend, I can tell you this with absolute certainty: it’s worth it. The real thing is so much better than the fake. 

In my own life, I have started to make these choices and the change was so drastic and so quick, it’s been almost hard to really believe. I went from a stay at home mother of 2 small boys that felt overwhelmed, done and over it all by about 8pm every night, to a stay at home mother of 2 small boys that ends the day feeling like I had everything I needed all day to meet every situation that came up, and I still have something left in the tank. 

So my question to you today is what would your life look like if when you were weary, you went to Jesus first? Not tv, not Facebook, not a book or a bath. Just Jesus. What would that look like? How would your life change? Why not give it a try for 1 day? 

Let me know what you think or how your 1 day worked for you in the comments!