REST: WHY IT IS ELUSIVE AND HOW TO REFOCUS | PART 1
2021 crept up on us like a shy sunrise over the faint and dull horizon. With so little fanfare, I told my wife that I kind of like how 2021 came. As we are coming off our sabbatical afresh, I thought I would start my 2021 blog (in a 5 part series) with the topic of rest. I wrote a paper in 2016 addressed to Korean missions leaders. Though I wrote for the Korean audience, I do think the applications and the reach of the paper does involve all of us. I share this paper not because I think I have mastered how to rest, but because I continue to discover how important it is for my soul through ups and downs.
Introduction
This year’s topic of rest is a continuation and an invitation to deeper reflection from last year’s theme, emotionally healthy missions. Why is Bangkok Forum addressing the issue of rest when the Forum is all about missionary work? Why is this topic crucial and relevant for us to consider? This paper will deal with a brief biblical reflection on rest. However, I would like to position this paper more as a practical working paper, stimulating and encouraging Korean missions effort to embrace the topic of rest. Simply put, we need to understand why, what, and how to rest in order for an emotionally healthy missionary effort to continue both on the field and at home. Without knowing rest both in theory and practice, we cannot and will not function out of emotionally healthy missions, thus impacting the field adversely.
Stress has been called the “health epidemic of the 21st century” by the World Health Organization and is estimated to cost American businesses up to $300 billion a year.[1] According to a 2014 report compiled by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) comparing the average annual hours of workers of the world[2], Korea is nearly on the top of the list for 2,124 annual hours.[3] Only Mexico with 2,132 hours and South Africa with 2,209 hours come out higher than Korea. Our neighboring country, Japan, which has a hapless reputation of karoshi, literally translated as deaths from overwork, averages only 1,729 hours. As we will see later, this is not a small matter when it comes to the topic of rest.
Why do we not rest?
As a way of an extended introduction, it is worth pondering why we do not or cannot rest. All of us can identity and articulate why we are not programmed to rest, especially as a modern human being. Modernity is presumably linked with speed, efficiency, and busyness. Surely, being efficient and rightly busy are not inherently bad. Nonetheless, if we become blindly busy and have unhealthy expectations of being fast and efficient all the time, then there is a lot more to overcome in order for us to enter into rest. My guess is that we give lip service that rest is good and needed. However, there is a great chasm between what we know and what we do or don’t regarding rest.
Below are some of my thoughts related to why we do not rest.
We are taught to sacrifice. We are taught to count the cost, and obedience is interpreted as sacrifice. We have to die to ourselves. Sacrifice is the name of the game. While this is not untrue, this mentality can easily extend itself to ignoring our health, suffering under inordinate amount of stress, and even hurting our own family in the name of sacrifice. Taken to an extreme, this spills over to the conviction that we have to do the work because no one else will. Somehow over time, mature spirituality translated into sacrifice and hyper self-denial that deny proper self-care and rest.
Today’s cultural context of competition and busyness impacts the way we do missions. Our supporters live in the world of busyness and competition. Taking time off for rest is a “luxury” that only a few were taught to embrace. Unfortunately, being busy and how well we are doing are perceived to be directly proportional to each other. Churches back home have bought into this mindset. Now, there is good and healthy competition of desiring to see new believers added as well as new churches established. When we take matters into our own hands for desired outcomes is when competition has gone beyond the healthy state. A general expectation is that out of this competition, we push for results that are not ours to pursue.
Could it be that we do not rest because we do not trust God? Of course, nobody would say this. But in a closer look, could it be that we work hard and harder because if don’t, our work, or even worse, God’s work will not get done? I can ask this question because I functioned out of this place. So I know how to make things sound spiritual and live out of this danger. This is at the heart of why we don’t rest. We will be quick to deny it, but this is a deeper reality than we acknowledge.
The above point leads to the issue of control. Whose work are we doing anyway? Who is in control of our work? Can we trust God to run the universe without us? This, of course, is an absurdly rhetorical question. But my point is if God can run the universe without us or our input or effort, then how much can we trust God for the works God calls us into? By this, I do not mean that we are not needed in God’s work. God graciously invites and calls us to His work but the “control” rests only on Him.
[2] For more info, go to http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDB_LV
[3] Believe it or not, this is an improvement from 2008 figure of 2,357hours per year which was ranked number one out of every other OECD member countries according to the OECD data. http://www.forbes.com/2008/05/21/labor-market-workforce-lead-citizen-cx_po_0521countries.html