Until we gather again as a community, CTK will release a daily devotional each morning. Each devotional will include a song to sing, a short devotional (to be read alone or with your family), questions for discussion or reflection, and a prayer. This is the first in our series.
Devotional:
Anytime we are faced with a situation that is dangerous, uncertain, or out of our control, we feel afraid. Our responses to that fear vary widely. Some of us paradoxically love that feeling of fear, and we search for it like adrenaline junkies at an amusement park. Others of us long to escape the discomfort of new surroundings, where our old routines and habits don't provide the comfort we sought, and where our carefully manicured image of calm control might be exposed to be the flimsy charade that we know deep down that it is. And in the midst of these various responses. there is always a cacophony of voices telling us to not be afraid. Some of them masquerade as voices of faith ("fear is a lack of faith!"), some of them as voices of reason ("Live your life, don't let fear guide you!"), all of them seeming tinny and hollow. If they are so unafraid, why are they shouting so loud?
But rarely do we ask the deeper, more spiritual question, "Why, exactly, are we afraid?" That would demand that we sit with our fear, question it, get to know it a little bit. But this is no prison-cell interrogation, with our fear safely locked in handcuffs on the other side of the class. To interrogate our fear is to recognize our weakness.
There are many legitimate reasons to be afraid of COVID-19, or sickness at all: they physical symptoms, consequences for loved ones, social and economic disruption. I don't mean to minimize these at all. But when I interrogate my fear a little, when I sit across from my own personal Hannibal Lecter, I find something else, right alongside these other fears.
I find the fear of rest.
Experts are agreed that the best way to combat the spread of this outbreak is to stop what we are doing: stop our work, stop our commerce, stop our play, stop our gathering. To stop and rest. And if we are honest, stopping is not something we are good at. Our restless relentlessness as human beings, our drive to transcend all barriers, to maximize productivity, to hustle and grind and produce and make something out of ourselves... this is a good desire gone haywire; the sixth day of creation ("fill the earth and have dominion") without the seventh ("and God rested from all that he had done"). To rest forces us to engage with the voices inside of us, the people and neighbors immediately around us- the people who don't but our charade. We are restless, not because home is boring, but because it is far too dangerous. This restlessness gave us a world where physical and geographic boundaries were transcended, where production continued day and night, where people went everywhere always in pursuit of the objective, building restless roads that a plague could walk on.
When I was a campus minister with RUF at SCAD, I would work furiously all through the academic year- nights, weekends, whatever it took. Then Christmas break or summer would come, and my body would collapse, and I would get sick. Sick from lack of rest. Jesus was trying to tell me something.
JRR Tolkien once wrote, "What punishments of God are not gifts?" Maybe, maybe, maybe in some small way, the fact that rest is, at present. the only vaccine for COVID-19 should cause us to stop. To stop and think. Why are we so unable to rest? What are we afraid we might find, if we stopped are were alone with ourselves?
A quote:
"You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you." - St. Augustine
For discussion:
1. What is it like being alone/with just your family? What tensions and anxieties do you feel between one another? What joys are there?
2. What patterns can you cultivate in your house to make this a restful time? What do you need to stop doing? What do you need to start doing?
3. What or who do you notice about your room/house/family/street that you did not notice before rest?
A prayer for rest:
Click here to read a prayer from Scotty Smith.