Resisting Rest
Rest is the kind of word I understand in concept, but when asked to define what it looks like in practice, I hesitate. I’ve spent so little of my life actually practicing it.
When I was a little girl, I resisted sleep. I know that experience isn’t uncommon. We often hear about children who won’t take naps or who struggle to fall asleep. But for me, rest felt like a monster I needed to avoid, as if it would eat the waking moments of my life. I didn’t value sleep, stillness, or time that wasn’t filled with something productive.
I’m not sure if I was always like this, but by the time I was about ten years old, I loved staying up late. I would sneak out of bed at night to watch movies in the dark. In my teenage years, that pattern continued. I remember working on sewing projects or reading books well into the night. I would do almost anything but sleep.
Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, they say, so I kept myself busy.
We are Jamaican, and in our house, rest was a dirty word. No one ever said that outright, but we lived as if it were true. If you sat idle for too long, you’d hear, “Don’t you have something to do?” Doing was how I earned approving smiles. Doing was how I proved my worthiness.
And this was the script I brought into my relationship with God.
Salvation, for me, was more about the act of being baptized and outward displays of faith than it was about believing the truth of Ephesians 2:8-9 KJV,
“ 8 For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:
9 Not of works, lest any man should boast.”
I understood the concept of grace and faith, but I did not understand what it really meant in my heart. In my mind, it was not enough for me to believe; I had to be doing something to earn Christ’s sacrifice.
So, I worked hard at being a “good Christian,” a “good employee,” a “good wife,” a “good mom.” You name it, working hard was the name of the game, and I was fully committed to doing as much of it as I could.
Rest, in my mind, was for the lazy or for those whose lives had little purpose.
I lived years at an unrelenting pace, putting work squarely on the throne of my heart. I would never have admitted it out loud, but in my mind my job was my provider and the source of my achievements. Work was my idol, and rest was nowhere in my vocabulary.
That is, until the Lord began a slow process of stripping away the very thing I secretly believed gave my life purpose and meaning.
If I am honest, I lived many years of my Christian life believing that work gave me my identity. My job title told people who I was. So, when the Lord asked me to walk away from the thing I had propped up as my provider and the source of my identity, it marked the beginning of His slow work of re-centering both of those back to Him.
And the vehicle He used was my relationship with rest.
As I sat with the concept of rest, the Lord keeps guiding me back to Psalm 23:1–4 KJV:
1 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
3 He restoreth my soul:
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: for thou art with me;
Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
This reminder hit me like a ton of bricks: if He is my shepherd, then He is also my provider. Provision is not something I earn through effort, but something I receive through trusting the good Shepherd.
Over the last several years, the Lord called me to rest on the Sabbath, and I found joy in the rhythm of setting that day aside to be with Him and my family. I looked forward to it with anticipation. There was a gift in being able to stop and say no to doing without regret, guilt, or fear. Having a day designated for rest felt freeing. I learned to delight in it, in part because I could schedule it and because it fit comfortably into my introverted life.
But then the Lord began to expand the borders of His desire for rest in my life.
His heart for me was not that I would collapse into Sabbath at the end of restless week after restless week, but that rest would become part of how I live. Part of my rhythm. Part of my trust.
The biggest test of this came when the Lord called me to rest from my business at the end of 2024. I struggled with this. When I shared that struggle with a friend, she asked me why. My answer surprised even me:
“I feel like if I stop, I won’t want to begin again.”
I didn’t realize it at the time, but those words summed up how I had been living in relation to work. There was a part of me that believed my constant doing was the only momentum keeping things going in my business. If I stopped, everything would stop.
In that moment, God exposed another layer of the lie I had been believing. This lie kept me working when I needed to stop.
Last year, I half-stopped. I rested here and there, but my mind did not stop. I did not bring the joy of Sabbath rest into the end-of-year rest the Lord had called me to. And I entered 2025 with a lot of ideas that seemed good and right, but were also rooted in me trying, once again, to be my own provider.
This year, I hear the Lord calling me into an end-of-year season of rest again. And I want to do it differently this time.
Not as an escape. Not as a collapse. But as an act of trust.
If you feel the same invitation, if rest feels uncomfortable or even scary, I want to offer this encouragement: don’t resist it. Trust Him as provider. Trust that God is able to do more through your rest than you could ever accomplish through your striving.
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