striver.

This morning I was reading in Ecclesiastes and several thoughts sprang to mind, particularly as I read these verses:

"For what has man for all his labor, and for the striving of his heart with which he has toiled under the sun?  For all his days are sorrowful, and his work burdensome; even in the night his heart takes no rest.  This also is vanity.  Nothing is better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and that his soul should enjoy good in his labor.  This also, I saw, was from the hand of God."  Eccl 2.22-24

Even in the night his heart takes no rest.  This is familiar territory for me.  Since this summer, I've felt God whispering, or perhaps even yelling,

"Lib...chill out!  Take a rest.  Come be with Me and just breathe."

I knew I was in trouble when even after desperately striving to find rest, I couldn't do it!  How's that for irony?

The more I sought to do this, the more I realized how restless my heart is and has been for a long time.  In the past I have told my mom that she needs to chill out and stop striving so hard for everything. And now, here I am, eating my own words, realizing that this apple has not fallen far from the tree.

Sometimes I wonder if reacting to crises in my life comes easier for me. Someone once said that living through a crisis is easy...it's the day to day living that is more difficult to survive. As I've reflected upon my life over the past years, it has been one sort of "crisis" after the next...all the moving, the military, the deployments, the babies, the miscarriages, etc. There has always been something "just around the bend" to keep my heart and mind occupied and striving towards.  

Even this adoption was a crisis of sorts.  When we started praying about it, there was a tremendous sense of urgency about the whole thing. We have to do this and do it NOW! And while I firmly believe that God has called us to do this, I also believe my mind took the entire endeavor a step further by thinking that it was up to me to save the orphans, that I must work tirelessly to fill the gaping abyss of need in this world, and that God desperately needed me to do this work.

What I have come to see over the past months, in the drudgery of daily living and the discomfort of waiting, is that God doesn't need me to do anything.  He is God and I am human...a human child of God that needs rest and sleep and food and play and exercise.  He did not create me to strive to make right all the wrongs of the world, and when I strain to do that, I'm arrogantly ignoring the glorious sacrifice He made by giving up His own son. I'm denying my own powerlessness, and this denial keeps me from living in the reality that He is God and I am not.  He graciously chooses to use me to carry out incredible plans within His kingdom...but it's not all up to me.  On the contrary, not much of anything is up to me.  And thank God for that, because I am starting to embrace that there is great freedom in this realization.  I am starting to understand that there is perhaps more to learn about Him in the dailiness of life than there is on the spiritual mountaintop or the valley of crises.

I mean, seriously, how can I compete with this?  

I woke up to this view out of our kitchen window a few months ago.
As Anne Lamott would say, God was being a bit "show-offy."

***

In the book I'm currently reading, The Quotidian Mysteries, Kathleen Norris writes:

"Is it not a good joke that when God gave us work to do as punishment for our disobedience in Eden, it was work that can never be finished, but only repeated, day in and day out, season upon season, year after year?  I see here not only God's keen sense of humor, but also a creative and zestful love.  It is precisely these thankless, boring, repetitive tasks that are hardest for the workaholic or utilitarian mind to appreciate, and God knows that being rendered temporarily mindless as we toil is what allows us to approach the temple of holy leisure."

Or, in the lyrics of Chris Martin: "Everything I do, it just comes undone...yeah that's the hardest part."

***

I am coming to understand that resting in God is a choice.  It requires that I surrender myself completely to His will and purposes, which is mutually exclusive with striving, worrying, and "chasing after the wind."  Resting in God runs parallel to living in the moment, embracing the work at hand, especially that work which doesn't produce visible and lasting results.

The fourth chapter of Hebrews is a convicting place for me to go with all of this.  I stumbled upon...or rather was graciously led to it...several months ago...ironically during a sleepless night in Las Vegas.  The whole chapter is incredible, but for now I will quote verses 9 and 10:

"There remains therefore a rest for the people of God.  For he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His."

God is not above rest...so why should I be?  I'm coming to realize that resting in God is a way of life...one that is not devoid of mental, emotional, and spiritual discipline.  It requires a near constant surrender of my thoughts and feelings to God's truth, which at this point, can often feel more uncomfortable than restful, but I'm hoping that won't always be the case. 

What do you find yourself striving for?