Secrets from the Treadmill: Discover God's Rest in the Busyness of Life
192
Secrets from the Treadmill: Discover God's Rest in the Busyness of Life
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Overview
We're all aware of God's commandment to "remember the Sabbath and keep it holy." After all, it's one of the Big 10. But how many of us really observe a Sabbath of rest? More than just a lazy Sunday afternoon, we all need "Sabbaths"-times of reflection and relaxation-in this stressed-out world.
With a pastor's experience and insight, and an award-winning writing style, Secrets from the Treadmill presents a rejuvenating plan of rest replenishment to stressed-out, overworked people. Offering practical and spiritual motives to engage in periods of rest, the book also provides realistic solutions for fitting Sabbaths into a busy life. Finally, it includes a chapter devoted to wise "resters" from the Bible.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781418534813 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nelson, Thomas, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/07/2004 |
| Sold by: | HarperCollins Publishing |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 533 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
SECRETS FROM THE TREADMILL
Discover God's Rest in the Busyness Of LifeBy Pete Briscoe Patricia Hickman
Nelson Books
Copyright © 2004 Pete Briscoe and Patricia HickmanAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4185-3481-3
Chapter One
TreadmillsThe culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it. —MORRIE SCHWARTZ Everybody today seems to be in such a terrible rush; anxious for greater developments and greater wishes and so on; so that children have very little time for their parents; parents have very little time for each other; and the home begins the disruption of the peace of the world. —MOTHER TERESA
Dave, my accountability partner and friend, looked worn to the bone, wrung out. I had noticed that every time we got together for our once-a-week meeting, he appeared wearier than the last time we had met. His business, while prospering, had exacted so much of his time and personal energy that he sat slumped in front of me, weary-eyed. Even his words reflected the weight of stress that had straddled his life.
I said, "Dave, I've heard of businesspeople who needed a break, and so they just took the time off. Maybe you should take some time off." He stared at me as though I had spoken in a foreign tongue. Guys like us didn't admit to taking breaks.
"Take a sabbatical," I said.
Finally, he took the bait. The next time we met, he was a different person. He told me, "I'm finally taking a break. I just walked into the office, told everyone what they needed to do to fill my shoes, and then left." Dave took off for two and a half months. Over time, I watched in amazement as God refilled his tank. He said to me one day, "So, Pete, you look tired yourself. When are you taking your sabbatical?"
I went home and asked my wife, Libby, "Do I look tired? Do you think I need a rest too?" She nodded and affirmed what Dave had said.
For the first ten years as pastor of Bent Tree Bible Fellowship I had promised to take a break, promised my family and myself. But work—even God's work—kept me running, with my pace as constant as the changing minutes on my clock. I had convinced myself that stopping my work would kill the flow of progress I had worked so hard to create. Never mind the fatigue with which I lived. The very idea of a sabbath rest conflicted with my ideals that working for God was a nonstop mission.
Sabbath rest is a term foreign to our progressive thought. Yet we are drawn to such an idea, as though it were an exhibit in a museum, a masterwork we are not allowed to touch. We have rewritten God's design for humanity, which inherently contains a time for rest, and then called the rewriting of His architecture God-pleasing.
Having lived most of my life in overdrive, I had reached a point of dryness and exhaustion. Wisdom dictated that I take a two-month leave from the pulpit—a sabbath rest. It was a decision that opened a fresh stream of thought into the desert of my life.
When Anne Morrow Lindbergh penned her sabbatical's masterwork, Gift from the Sea, she scribbled with pencil and paper each morning of her summer break and then shared her awakenings with others. As she delved into her own soul, she began to understand that most men and women live in such a way that refilling their creative wells has to be a pursuit in and of itself:
But as I went on writing and simultaneously talking with other women, young and old, with different lives and experiences— those who supported themselves, those who wished careers, mothers and those with more ease—I found that my point of view was not unique. In varying settings and under different forms, I discovered that many women, and men, too, were grappling with essentially the same questions as I, and were hungry to discuss and argue and hammer out possible answers. Even those whose lives had appeared to be ticking imperturbably, their smiling clock-faces were often trying, like me to evolve another rhythm with more creative pauses in it, more adjustment to their individual needs, and new and more alive relationships to themselves as well as others.
The tide of life or, if intertwined with faith, the tide of our spiritual pursuits, has its own cycles: rolling in and out, searching, finding, observing, and leading us to act on our discoveries. We believe that acting on what we say is God's will or His plan for our lives is a natural part of servanthood. But if our only role is as active organisms, never reflecting or meditating on His ways, forgetting the feast set before us, then our energy is nothing but kinesis—movement in search of the next stimulant. I have known such Christians and watched as they bounced from popular movement to popular movement or cause to cause, never absorbing the beauty and splendor of the faith that they have embraced.
As a Christian leader, a husband, and a dad, I first had to notice my wrung-out life. Then I had to commence the refilling of my emptied-out existence. My spiritual source had to have a spigot, and I had to find it and then stretch myself beneath it. Like a thirsty boy beneath a garden faucet, I had to open my spiritual mouth and let the refreshment pour inside.
I had to seek a sabbath rest.
During this first sabbatical from the church, we used part of the time away to visit with friends. When our children, Cameron and Annika, begged to take a turn on a friend's treadmill, the oldest, Cameron, stepped on first. Within a short amount of time, he was running so fast I could scarcely see his legs. His sister watched him from the side, quiet—at rest. I looked at this picture: Cameron running as fast as he could go and Annika still and at rest, and I thought to myself, Here is my life—Pete in North Dallas, and Pete on sabbatical. Then it struck me—They're both making the same amount of progress. The Scripture came to me: "My heart is not proud, O LORD, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have stilled and quieted my soul" (Ps. 131:1–2).
Finally, I stood still long enough to hear God's thunderous whisper. The time had come for me to stop my running and working, and listen.
Before the industrial age, the majority of those living in the developed nations resided in rural communities—quiet hamlets that had church and family life at their centers. Human invention ushered in time-saving machinery that took humans farther and faster than any discoveries in the history of mankind. Our rural apex disappeared. But instead of using the sudden surplus of time for quiet meditation or introspective study—a practice that might have taken us collectively into the soul of our humanity—we applied our increased abundance of time to more work and a higher cost of living. Like Cameron, we leaped on the treadmill of commerce and progress, running faster and faster, but going nowhere in terms of our inner lives. The treadmill became our life. John Ortberg, in The Life You've Always Wanted, said:
We buy anything that promises us the ability to hurry. The best-selling shampoo in the country rose to the top because it combined shampoo and conditioner in one step eliminating all of that time-consuming rinsing people once had to do ... Many of us have "hurry sickness," haunted by the fear that there are not enough hours in the day to do what needs to be done. We read faster, we talk faster, and when we're listening to people we nod faster to encourage the talker to accelerate ... We have largely traded wisdom for information, depth for breadth. We want microwave maturity.
Ortberg stuns us with this conclusion:
The greatest danger is not that we will renounce our faith, ... but settle for a mediocre version of it.
The Lesson of Shabbat
When I split open the word sabbatical and boiled it down to its root, I found the essence in its Hebrew meaning: "to cease and desist." Shabbat is a precept steeped in the first principle spoken over the earth's freshly drying creation:
By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done. (Genesis 2:2–3)
In the portrayal of Creation, the Scriptures repeat three times that God rested on the third day. In the cadence of scriptural repetition, we can almost hear God's gentle pounding on the drum of our hearts—take rest, take rest, take rest.
The lesson of Shabbat whispers to us from the early shadows falling for the first time on virgin earth all the way through the loudness of our contemporary lives—Stop your work so you can see Mine. But rest in modern terms is associated with slackers. To deliberately seek a period of rest strikes a blow of guilt inside us colliding with a social mantra, one that enslaves us with a work ethic that is neither fruitful nor productive.
The great theologian Winnie the Pooh said, "Don't underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering."
Stopping the voice that drives us to work without rest challenges our social fiber. We pander to the philosophy that rest is wrong. We buy into the opinion that a never-ending work cycle is a valuable ethic. We biblically justify that even Jesus violated the Sabbath. Yet while Christ's short visit to Earth created a role model for our daily living, we have to remember that He was the Lord of the Sabbath.
A mom once said to me, "I have to give structure to my children based on their level of maturity. But that does not mean I am bound by that same structure." By the same token, Jesus did not violate the Sabbath or disregard it to destroy its meaning but rather to declare His lordship. He had an infinite job to do and only three and a half years to accomplish it. Yet His pace, measured and slow, was not forced. He did not strong-arm His way into people's hearts, and He did not use a fast-bake method to mentor His disciples.
In the book of Mark, the apostles gathered around Jesus and reported to Him all they had done and taught. Then, because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, He said to them, "Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest" (6:31).
The Lord of the universe conveyed a core message through this one simple earthly act—man was not created for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man. While He dispelled the futility of legalism, He raised the importance of the need for physical renewal—rest in the midst of our passion-driven existence. Work and then rest. Somehow modern thought skips the latter, wrecking the cadence of Christ's acumen. So now we hear only part of the message, like a broken record that misses an entire beat. Work ... work ...
David Roper said, "Shabbat is not a day, it's a disposition, a profound conviction that God is working while we rest. It is rest from our labor, an unencumbered, unhurried, relaxed lifestyle." But our thought lives are shaped differently, and fitting this philosophy into a work-shaped ethic does not flex with what we've been taught.
When I finally stopped my work and quieted my soul, God spoke. He poured into me five life lessons that have become my continuous scaffold for meditation and a framework for seeking Him in still places.
The First Lesson of Shabbat: Rest and Know God's Reliability
The psalmist said, "Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain. In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat—for he grants sleep to those he loves" (Ps. 127:1–2).
Here is where we, in our stubborn, silent aggression, disagree with our Maker. We cannot imagine God telling His people, "Relax a bit, and get some rest—I'll be watching, building." We do not notice how productive He was the first week that light and life spilled onto this earth, and then how He rested. The prophet of Chronicles said to David, "You will have a son who will be a man of peace and rest ... He is the one who will build [the temple]" (1 Chron. 22:9–10). We forget God's plan yields more work through the lives of rested men and women.
The deeper message is sent to us in a whisper, straight from the heart of God: Stop your work, and you'll realize how much you can trust Me.
For the anxiety-laden majority, how is peace found in taking a sabbatical if the time is spent in worry that we are slackers? When we lay down our tools—our computers, the Internet, our handheld organizational devices—we imagine that all progress comes to a frightening halt. We envision cobwebs forming over our well-laid plans, dust collecting on our shining reputations.
The word Shabbat occurs in the biblical text for the first time when speaking of the miracle of manna, the mysterious food sent by God. Moses said:
"This is what the Lord commanded: 'Tomorrow is to be a day of rest, a holy Sabbath to the LORD. So bake what you want to bake and boil what you want to boil. Save whatever is left and keep it until morning.'" So they saved it until morning, as Moses commanded, and it did not stink or get maggots in it. "Eat it today," Moses said, "because today is a Sabbath to the Lord. You will not find any of it on the ground today. Six days you are to gather it, but on the seventh day, the Sabbath, there will not be any." (Exodus 16:23–26)
Even when they weren't gathering, his provision arrived.
But even when our excuse to work without rest is spiritually removed, we persist. Our work is our drug of choice, our escape from the pain of life. Work provides our significance. Even if our words proclaim that we trust in God, our actions prove that we are addicted to a speeding pace.
Is it arrogance on our part to assume that God in His boundless power cannot cause the world to spin without us? Or do we harbor a deeper worry—that we'll lose the control we've worked so hard to obtain?
The Second Lesson of Shabbat: Rest and Know God's Majesty
For me, a meaningful sabbatical incorporates beauty and tranquility and is more about drawing my thoughts into a rested, introspective state of mind and less about changing locations. But a change of scenery can take my heart places too long neglected, to show me things I could never see on fast-forward. To know God's majesty, I have to stop and recognize it: the things He put in front of me that show me glimpses of His greatness, His dignity, and His splendor.
The summer of my sabbatical, I visited Austria with my mother and father to minister together. We stayed at Schloss Klaus, the Capernwray Bible school, a college nestled in the valley between the foothills of the Alps. The river ran below, and the mountains filled the horizon. For two days we took leave of our work at the school to drive down the less-traveled roads, mountain paths that led us into villages greened by summer's breath. However cold the winters in Salzburg, the deciduous landscape had melted into an infinite eddy of life, beckoning us to explore the mountains' cache of streams and waterfalls. We wound through evergreen mountain slopes and blissful, snaking roads leading upward. We stopped by a lake for breakfast, and it was on this body of water that I drank in the beauty of God's amazing handiwork.
Psalm 29:4 says, "The voice of the LORD is powerful; the voice of the LORD is majestic."
I soon discovered that when I stopped and stilled my soul, I could then hear God and His majesty speaking from His creation. I heard it, that majestic voice, on a hike. One morning I got up early while the clouds hugged the mountain peaks. I hiked through a heavily wooded hillside until I found a clearing. The clouds partially cleared, and against the mountainous backdrop a single tree came into view. The tree towered above all else, isolated from the woody groves. Time had stripped the tree of its branches, yet the trunk had transcended the elements and remained steadfast and living, even though the wind had left it naked of bark. God's Spirit spoke to me and showed me myself as a tree, a leader in Christ's church.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from SECRETS FROM THE TREADMILL by Pete Briscoe Patricia Hickman Copyright © 2004 by Pete Briscoe and Patricia Hickman. Excerpted by permission of Nelson Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
1. Treadmills....................12. The Quarrel Within....................17
3. The Sabbatical of Obedience....................32
4. "The Better Thing"....................47
5. Rivers, Trees, and Me....................61
6. Secrets from the Wise Guys....................74
7. The Rest of the Gospel....................98
8. Paradise Lost....................111
9. Custom-Made for a Different World....................130
10. The Things We Don't Do Anymore....................145
11. No Wonder They Call It Holy....................166
12. Turned-Over Leaves....................180
13. A Plan for Your Sabbath Rest....................196
Notes....................207
About the Authors....................211