Reading Time: 3 minutes

While I was on vacation, my parents were in an accident.

I don’t know where I was, what I was doing. But before seven one chilly Iowa morning, two deer collided with their Chevy–one over the hood, one beneath the car. My grandmother, traveling a safe distance behind them in her own car, slammed into them when my dad hit his brakes. Airbags billowed to life everywhere. Both vehicles were totaled.

I probably don’t need to tell you how relieved that of the three of these dear people, all walked away completely unscathed—not even sore the next day. I am thankful for insurance companies and rental cars and wise engineers (go, airbags!) and the helpers God places around us when bad things inevitably happen on this mortal coil.

Here’s another great thing; I didn’t have to ask God to take care of my parents before it happened. I was relaxing. He was working.

Our Scheduled Weakness

Speaking with my mom about all of this, she reminded me about the complete unproductivity to which we all surrender for about eight hours a day. Like our smartphones, we all have to be charged; to plug ourselves into the sweet surrender of sleep. My mom mentioned a thought from Max Lucado–something about us all being about as useful as a sack of potatoes. I’ve found it amazing that for about one-third of my life, I’m completely unconscious, unable to protect myself. God has made me to have to trust every 24 hours.

I felt this more in Uganda, where guards were employed to walk around compounds at night. Even then, break-ins commonly tore through the fabric of sleep. One night, I woke to my neighbor crying out at the top of her lungs after thieves  invaded her home, threatened her with horrible, seething promises.

Every morning, unlocking the chains of my front door, it was a reminder for sheer thankfulness: I woke from sleep and nothing happened.

Newborn babies are such perfect, soft little portraits of this. They have done nothing to bring themselves into the world, and slumber a good, what? 15 hours a day. Mine would lay there with their arms flung up beside their heads, like narcoleptics caught in the act of a crime: Hands up! Surrender!  Rest, you see, is a form of faith.

God doesn’t need me.

But this is what I love, in these rhythms of rest and Sabbath: God continues to nudge me that he doesn’t need me, or my prayers, or my feverish work on his behalf, or my fastidiousness, to keep this planet whirling in space. He breathed it into existence without me. It does not all depend on me, or my ability to pray for it and bring it about. Despite my Western values of productivity and achievement, once a day God reminds me, You are not a hired hand. Take a load off, and trust me.

Of course he delights in my work, invites me to leverage our relationship within prayer, opens his hands to respond. He beckons and commands me to work with the smooth grain of his purposes rather than against it. He chooses to weave crazies like me into his fabric, with my frizzy hair and uncanny ability to embarrass myself and occasional tendency to snore.

But it’s built into me, into all of us: It is not all up to me (or you). Whoever you are, you must rest. This is your Father’s world. Rest assured.

He will not let your foot slip—
he who watches over you will not slumber;

indeed, he who watches over Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.

It is in vain that you rise up early
and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he gives to his beloved sleep.

Psalm 121:3-4, 127:2

Like this post? You might like