The Art of Rest

The Art of Rest, Adam Mabry (The Good Book Company, 2018)

I often have a book about rest on my shelf waiting to be read. I’m sure it is due to God’s gentle prompting that I grab it when we go on holidays. For me, times of leave are good times to think further about rest and its purpose. In the past, I have delved into The Art of Rest (Claudia Hammond), and Refresh (Shona & David Murray) as well as others that touch on this idea: The Busy’s Christian’s Guide to Busyness, Serving without Sinking, Zeal without Burnout, Going the Distance, and so on.

I really liked this short book from Adam Mabry. He starts acknowledging he is an unlikely candidate to write about rest, having pushed himself too much for way too long. Yet, he also concedes - if he has been able to learn how to rest, you can too.

Overarching the book are two themes - rest is a gift (from God, given for very good reasons) and rest is an art (there is no one way to do it, but rather to find ways that suit you).

Beginning with a history lesson of rest and why God has given it to us, we are reminded that it is truly a gift from a loving God: 

“If God is a hurried taskmaster constantly turning knobs and pushing buttons, frantically refining his work, it's hard to imagine resting with him. But if God the Father, Son, and Spirit are the very definition of love, and fundamentally relational, and the idea of resting with him becomes more than imaginable. It becomes desirable.” 

What struck me was his link to the fact that once the temple was a place to meet God, now that we have the spirit and our bodies are a temple to the Lord. So, he calls the Sabbath a time temple - a chance for us to stop and rejoice in God in our lives, “but do we have the time -do we make the time - to Sabbath, to experience a time holy to God?”

Following chapters explore:

• Rest allows remembering - God, ourselves, the meaning of life, and grace. 

“The story of the whole Bible is in many ways the story of a people who always forget their God and a God who always remembers his people”

• Rest is resistance. All work is done for one of two ends - to glorify God or justify your existence, “rest is an act of profound resistance against the siren call of self justification”. Rest helps us to resist anxiety, autonomy, coercion and idolatry. 

• Rest restores relationships - with God and others. There were four questions for self-examination: 

1. Are you really interested in having a relationship with God? 
2. Where is rushing ruining your relationship with God and others? 
3. In what ways have your tried to silence your inner murmur of self-reproach? 
4. Will you stop waiting to rest? 

• Rest brings reward. ”Rest anticipates the destination along the journey, because it offers an experience akin to being at the destination even while we are on the journey.” 

• Gifts of real rest - reward of memory (who we are in Christ), reflection, security (in our sonship), endurance (“if we want to keep going, we need to keep stopping”) and anticipation.

He finishes with what resting might actually look like. First, it’s not about following a rule, rather finding patterns that suit you daily (small allowances to breathe, pray, eat, reflect and worship), weekly, and annually. He suggests including: sleep, reading, prayer, reflection, avocation (eg hobbies, something that is not your job), recreation, eating, and singing, but with the encouragement to find your own activities of rest.

A very helpful book. Short and concise, but with enough to prompt thought and encouragement, and hopefully a desire to rest, understanding it is indeed a gift and an art, and necessary to grow in in order to thrive.

The Art of Rest

The Art of Rest, Claudia Hammond

I really enjoyed this book. In fact, just the process of reading it was immensely restful.

Claudia Hammond worked as part of a multidisciplinary team for two years studying rest. They covered research in numerous areas, as well conducting a survey called the Rest Test, of which over 18,000 people took part across 135 countries. This book summaries some of the findings, by investigating in detail the top ten activities that people surveyed found restful.

There is an acknowledgement that many people today do not feel they get enough rest:

“Modern work practices, modern lifestyles and modern technology have combined and conspired to make life in the early 21st-century ceaselessly demanding.”

Hammond does not include sleep as rest, but rather she means “any restful activity that we do while we’re awake”. For some, this may be active like exercise or gardening, for others rest might be more sedentary, perhaps listening to music, lying in the bath or reading. Some prefer it to have some mental effort like cryptic crosswords, others prefer to watch TV, or just sit quietly in nature.

She then counts down the top ten, starting with mindfulness, helping explaining what it actually is, and then turns to almost the opposite - watching TV:

“We could practice mindfulness, but there’s nothing wrong with a bit of mindlessness. Nothing wrong with zoning out rather than zoning in. Watching TV is escapist and easy…No practice needed. Just switch on the set and switch off the brain.”

She then covers daydreaming, a bath, a walk:

“So much of life these days is speeded up. Walking slows us down.” I found this chapter interesting as she looked at the relationship between rest and exercise, because for some people, including myself, exercise is restful, and it seems to have a double benefit:

“As well as finding the exercise itself restful, people who exercise tend to reward themselves with sedentary rest afterwards. A double whammy.”

Later chapters look at doing nothing in particular, not really something I find restful, but it was a helpful look into the chronic busyness of lives generally. Then came listening to music, where she notes “that listening to music is one of the most common self-care strategies used by people under twenty-five”.

The final three were choosing to be alone, spending time in nature and reading. That reading came in number one was absolutely no surprise to me - it is always my go-to activity for some downtime.

The team were also interested to observe the things that didn’t make the top ten, including catching up with friends and family, or time online. The majority of the activities could be, and often are, done alone, “it seems when we want to rest, we very often wasn’t to escape from other people”. Yet there is a fineline here, and she also explored ideas of too much rest, enforced rest, loneliness and boredom.

I appreciated how Hammond identifies numerous types of rest and how they might work, but acknowledges this is a personal thing,

“The fact is we are all on our own on this one. It is a case of self-diagnosis and self prescription. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from others. Everybody rests in their own way, but there are many common elements to the different ways we choose to rest.”

At the end, she considers what might the perfect prescription for rest. Some of these are obvious like make sure you rest enough, and do what works for you. But others about reframing your idea of rest were quite helpful - so give yourself permission to rest, keep an eye out for resting when you don’t realise it, and reframe your wasted time as rest (that time in line, on the train, etc). Then she moves into some life management tips for considering your own busyness - don’t fetish busyness, say no, and put breaks in your diary as well as appointments. Again, reasonably obvious, but it doesn’t mean we actually do it.

I found one comment particularly insightful here - that we often think we will have more time in the future, but we rarely do. So if you are asked to go to a two-day conference in 6 months, consider how you would feel in you had to fit it in in the next two weeks. If that thought fills you will dread at trying to fit in in, there is little chance you’ll be less busy in 6 months, so perhaps you should turn it down. Now, I know it’s not quite that simple, I often commit to things a long way out and then adjust my upcoming commitments because of that future choice, but I see what she is getting at.

All in all a very helpful book to consider rest as a whole, the things we might personally find restful, and it gives permission to see rest as important and necessary in our lives.