Rest, it seems to me, is an undervalued and forgotten spiritual discipline. Work is easy – it’s resting that really tests us. Yet I’m struck that at the end of the creation myths even God puts his feet up (and if God can, why do we struggle to let ourselves?). The theme of rest is rich, too, in the stories of wandering Israelites, retold in the letter to the Hebrews: our goal, our telos, is to enter God’s promised rest. This perspective is challenging – rest is not simply ‘another thing to do’, but a mind-set, a reality, to enter and live from, where, as the hymn-writer John Whittier put it, God may ‘take from our souls the strain and stress, and let our ordered lives confess the beauty of thy peace’.
In the midst of competing demands for our time and attention (some rightly so), the discipline of restfulness is an invitation to confront the anxiety of the world by resolving to observe ‘God’s time’: to rest, to trust, to wait. As the spring bulbs now show, it is from this place that we will grow.

The Revd James Crockford

Assistant Priest