Article by: Sarah Koontz, Founder of Living by Design Ministries
Are you weary and worn?
Tired of rushing through life and desperately in need of rest?
There is a secret art of restful living hidden in the midst of the hustle and bustle of this life, but it comes at a cost.
A dear friend and mentor taught me the value of restful living when I was in my teen years.
I am grateful that he took the time to explain true rest to me at such a tender age because the conversation left me forever changed.
Because of my underlying health issues, my body craves rest and often demands it.
This used to frustrate me to no end.
It made me feel weak, less-than, incapable, a burden to others.
I used to push through all of the signs of fatigue, striving to be the person I thought everyone needed me to be.
I denied my body of the rest it was yearning for and I found myself in a tailspin.
My life was spiraling out of control and something had to change.
When we feel tired, we have the tendency to do whatever we can to push through in order to accomplish the task of the day.
When we succumb to fatigue, we beat ourselves up for not being strong enough.
This has to stop!
It is not the way we were created to live.
The most difficult thing I have ever done is to accept my own physical and emotional limitations.
I spent years fighting for the life I thought I wanted, only to find myself in an exhausted heap on the floor.
The need to be needed, to be valuable, to be somebody drove me beyond myself.
It pushed me to say yes when I should have said no, to stay up late when I should have gone to bed and take on others burdens when I was drowning in my own.
I knew exactly who I wanted to be, the life I wanted to have, and it all required that I push through the fatigue that was closing in on me.
Then everything changed.
I pushed my body to a place where it began to break down and could not recover.
I over-extended myself to such an extreme that I was no longer capable of completing the simplest of tasks.
I came to the end of myself, and that is the place where I remembered the advice of my mentor.
Restful living requires complete trust.
We must know and understand that we have both physical and emotional limitations, and trust that God can use those limitations to teach us the beautiful art of rest.
Restful Living has the power to {R}estore, {E}quip, {S}ustain and {T}ransform your life.Restful living can only be achieved when we fully surrender body, mind and spirit to our Creator.
In a practical sense, this means that we must carve out time to rest.
And I don’t just mean physically; we must also learn to rest our mind and our spirit.
In order to accomplish this kind of rest in my own life, I have established one simple rule for myself:
It doesn’t count if only one part of me is resting. The physical body’s need for rest is easy to understand. But what about our mind? What about our spirit? Resting the body takes time, resting the mind takes discipline and resting the spirit takes faith. Without all three components, we will never be able to achieve a truly restful lifestyle. And true rest is the only way to heal and restore a burdened life and a broken body.
Finding true rest requires effort.
It is not easy, and it does not come naturally.
Only by the grace of God are we ever able to achieve it, and when that happens we find ourselves completely transformed.
Resting your body takes time, resting your mind takes discipline, resting your spirit takes faith.
When we stop pushing ourselves and start resting in the Lord, we will discover the kind of life we were created to live.
A life full of peace, hope, understanding and purpose.
