A reading from the Letter to the Hebrews:
“Beloved: While the promise of entering God’s rest is still open, let us take care that none of you should seem to have failed to reach it.”
Story of Rest
When was the last time you felt rested?
Recently I unintentionally fell asleep on our living room couch. It all started with me telling myself that I’m just going to place my head down for a couple of minutes until my kids arrive home from school. Of course, I have no recollection of them arriving home. The first thing that I noticed after waking up was that I was surrounded by my kids’ stuffed animals, including a stuffed Eoyore, Winnie the Pooh Character that I was grasping onto. My kids and wife started to laugh at me as they showed me embarrassing photos of me sleeping among the stuffed animals and hugging them.
Image by Jeremy Bishop from Unsplash.com
Despite this immensely embarrassing power nap, I felt well rested and was prepared to tackle our evening duties.
Making effort to enter rest
While physical rest restores our bodies and brains, resting in God (or spiritual rest) restores our souls. That all sounds very spiritual; how do we restore our intangible soul? In the same way we have to make regular time to eat and physically rest to restore our bodies, we have to make time for prayer to restore our soul. Prayer can come in different forms.