I thought I was taking the summer “off.” Here it is, nearly October as I write this, and I’m still trying to figure out how I ever did what I used to do.
I thought school starting would take care of everything.
Throughout my adulthood and as the seasons of my married life morph into new states, I seem to need to relearn the importance of rest.
Before I had kids, I didn’t really know what rest meant. It was something that was a theory, fine in the Bible but not such a reality in my life.
After I was married, I began to appreciate lazy days, and those became my rest.
And then we had kids. I’ve come to appreciate how rest is vital for my whole-self well-being and how it hinges on the ages of my children in many ways.
When my youngest is an infant, rest means napping through the day, something that’s anathema to me normally.
When my youngest is a toddler, rest means sitting down to actually eat an uninterrupted meal or snack without someone crawling on me.
When my youngest is a preschooler…well, I don’t know yet. I haven’t yet been in this situation, but I imagine rest will look still different for me.
I’ve also found that rest includes a day of no “for other people” work. Usually that means I don’t have any computer screens open, with words flowing across them from my fingers.
A few weeks ago, I spent a Sunday in rest from the limbs of an apple tree, tossing them down and laughing with my girls, who were shocked that I knew how to climb a tree.
We need time for rest…not just sitting still and being inactive, but true rest. There’s a reason God designed a day for rest and blessed it, and I’m rediscovering it all the time!
Sarah Reinhard’s a Catholic wife, mom, and author whose nose is probably in a book if she’s not scraping something off of her shoes. Her latest book is A Catholic Mother’s Companion to Pregnancy: Walking with Mary from Conception to Baptism and she’s online at SnoringScholar.com.
Visit Sarah’s blog: http://SnoringScholar.com/
Check out her books: http://SnoringScholar.com/my-books/
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