Worn Down

By David Barshinger

A week after I heard the first reports of swine flu in April, I came down with influenza type A myself. While the specialists never confirmed I had swine because they stopped testing non-hospitalized type A cases, my doctor was pretty certain I had contracted the H1N1 virus.

It came at a rather inopportune time, at the end of my semester. My school required everyone who had symptoms or tested positive to "isolate" themselves, so the illness forced me to miss my last week of classes.

The timing of the flu felt severely ironic because my previous semester had ended with pneumonia. The schedule I was keeping was wearing me down. It was obvious that I literally couldn't keep up with my calendar, that I was stretching myself beyond my limitations.

The Sky's the Limit?

"You can be anything you want if you just apply yourself." I grew up hearing that American slogan, and we relish it in part because, well, who doesn't love an underdog attaining great things through hard work?

And how can you criticize hard work anyway? God surely wants us to be diligent, working to please the Lord and not people (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:58 and Col 3:23). And it's clear he despises laziness (e.g., Prov. 19:15, Eccl. 10:18, Matt. 25:26).

But I've found that behind the maxim lurks a lie that we often miss: Limitations. The truth is, I can't be anything I want. God created me as a finite human being, which means I may have strengths, but I also have weaknesses, and limits.

Of course, God often uses our weaknesses to display his power (2 Cor. 12:9). We've heard the testimonies of people like Moses, the bumbler who became the great leader of Israel, confronting the mighty Pharaoh and guiding the Israelites out of bondage through the Sinai desert. But while God stretches us and empowers us to do things we thought we could never do, he has also created us with limitations.

The reality of my limitations is complicated by the pressures I face in a competitive marketplace. It's one thing to do my best and another to try to be better than everyone else.

Living in an economy where we can't take jobs for granted encourages such comparison and competition. A limited number of professorships awaits me and the many other doctoral students around the country when we graduate. Competition can sharpen us, but it can also stir up worry and workaholism.

What I forget is that this competitive world rests in the palm of its Creator who exists outside of time, our sovereign Father who knows my fears and my future and watches over me.

Jesus tells us in Matthew 6:25-27:

... do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?

Instead, Christ calls for orienting our lives around faithfulness to God, around right living, around the moral code Jesus lays out in the Sermon on the Mount. And when we do this, when we "seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness," we learn faith, to trust in the God who provides for our needs (Matt. 6:33).

Christ concludes, "Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble" (Matt. 6:34). In other words, a life driven by worry about the future, consumed by competition and fears and driving myself into the ground ‹ that's not a life of faith.

The life of faith recognizes that I have limits and am ultimately not in control. The life of faith works diligently but rests in the sovereign, limitless God.

Anxious Toil vs. Sleep

When I was recovering from my bout of pneumonia, I found a passage of Scripture that convicted me about my strenuous schedule and challenged me to shift my perspective on work.

Psalm 127:1 says, "Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain." Those who labor out of fear without trusting in Yahweh will never find the satisfaction they desire. If they don't live their life with the solid foundation of God's presence, their house will crumble.

And Psalm 127:2 really hits it home. It begins saying, "It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil."

I had been burning the midnight oil and getting up early, to the point it was damaging my health. And what is anxious toil but the competitive lifestyle that works me ragged out of fear that it won't be enough, out of worry that someone else will get ahead? Yet such a haggard lifestyle ultimately amounts to naught.

Why is it in vain? Verse 2 explains, "for he gives to his beloved sleep." And here we discover the beauty of a life lived with God at the foundation. It's not vain to rise up early, but to both rise early and go late to bed. Why? Because it forsakes faith in God.

The one who works diligently and entrusts himself to the Lord is the one who receives sleep. He is the object of God's love, and God grants him that sweet rest that fortifies and heals his body and soul. He can sleep at night without life's worries consuming him because he trusts in the Lord's faithfulness.

The subversive, freeing message of the gospel itself says we can't do it ‹ we need God. That reality doesn't evaporate after salvation. As limited, finite beings, we will always need God's grace and provision.

We see this truth in how God built into creation the need for rest. God gave us this model when he labored six days in creation, but "rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done," making that day holy (Gen. 2:2­3). And thus the fourth commandment, based on the model of creation, says, "Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work ..." (Exo. 20:9­10a).

Here we see a model of faithful labor: six days of work with a full day set aside for rest. Constant work wears us down, it certainly wore me down at the end of my past two semesters. We are finite beings, and we need to remember that God calls us to be diligent, not divine.

Realizing That Sweet Rest

Though I had meditated on Psalm 127 after my pneumonia, my recent recurrence of an end-of-the-semester illness indicates I haven't learned the lesson very well. It shows how much we are creatures of habit and how important it is to implement healthy disciplines in our lives.

How do we do that? Here are a few ways I'm trying to employ these principles from Scripture.

1. Balance responsibility and health. My ability to perform well in my work depends largely on the health of my body. An attuned physique yields a sharp mind. It's pertinent to discipline myself both to get sufficient sleep and to exercise regularly. That means cutting out time from work to go for a run and forcing myself to go to bed at a decent hour.
2. Be more disciplined and diligent with the time I spend working. This may mean surfing the Web a bit less when I should concentrate on the tasks at hand, or setting a timer for an hour of focused efforts before letting myself check e-mail. And this makes my time away from work all the better because I'm satisfied with my hard labor and thus free to engage others.
3. Develop greater dependence on God. I need to remember my mortality and throw myself on God's incorruptibility. He is God, and I am not. A key way to nurture dependence is disciplining myself to rest. For example, setting Sundays apart as a day to put aside all work, even when everyone else I'm competing against is logging in time, teaches me to depend on God.

The Scriptures make it clear that God wants to free us from anxious toil and grant us rest. Anxious toil robs us of the peace that comes from depending on the Lord.

God instead commands us to work hard, but acknowledge our limits and ultimately trust him to bless our labor and provide for our needs. And out of that frame of mind comes the freedom from worry and competition that makes God's rest so satisfying, so sweet.

From Boundless Webzine

"Where Do All The Colors Go At Night?"

By Albert Mohler

One of the most lamentable aspects of modern life is the disappearance of silence. Throughout most of human history, silence has been a part of life. Many individuals lived a significant portion of their lives in silence, working in solitude and untroubled by the intrusion of constant noise.

Historians often point to the Industrial Revolution as a great turning point in the human experience of environmental sound and constant noise. The arrival of the factory and the concentration of human populations in cities brought a transformation that was accompanied by increased noise and the displaced silence. Today, the problem of noise pollution is a matter of concern to many of us, who find our lives frequently interrupted by unwanted sounds and constant noise.

Our culture now assumes noise and the constant availability of music, electronic chatter, and entertainment. In many homes, there is virtually no silence -- at least during waking hours. In some homes, family members live in isolated environments of independent sound, with iPods, televisions, radios, and any number of other technologies providing a customized experience of noise.

All this takes a toll upon the soul. Psychologists argue that the development of individual identity requires extended periods of solitude, reflection, and silence. The Christian tradition has honored silence as a matter of spiritual discipline and an intentional effort to flee the noise of everyday life in order to hear what noise cannot supply.

If this is true for adults, it is perhaps even more true for children. But today's children are often subjected to a constant barrage of noise. Many are raised to the soundtrack of the television or other forms of entertainment. Some parents seem to fear silence and do their best to make certain that children are never without some form of sound.

Writing in the June issue of Standpoint, Susan Hill argues that our children are being impoverished by being deprived of silence. We have betrayed children, she asserts, by "confiscating their silence." As she explains:

But so difficult has it become to find such oases of silence, that many children never experience it. In adapting to constant noise, we seem to have become afraid of silence. Why? Are we afraid of what we will discover when we come face to face with ourselves there? Perhaps there will be nothing but a great void, nothing within us, and nothing outside of us either. Terrifying. Let's drown our fears out with some noise, quickly.

Most of us will quickly realize the truth contained in her assessment. It seems that many of us are, to a greater or lesser degree, almost afraid of silence. Our children quickly inherit the same fear.

In "Silence, Please," Susan Hill describes the delights of silence in a way that beautifully captures what so many have lost:

In a quiet library, the turning of a page, the scratch of pencil on paper, are separate, distinctive, sounds. They identify themselves to us, they have a personality. They are beautiful. It is not only natural sounds that gain a richness set in the context of silence — all sounds do. To deprive ourselves and our children of the ability to distinguish such aural detail is to diminish our sensory life.

As Susan Hill acknowledges, complete silence is very difficult to achieve. Her goal is not to see children experience an artificial silence, but instead to see children experience the natural sounds that come as gifts -- sounds that require turning off the television to hear.

"Our children are too rarely given that opportunity or taught that the contrast between noise and quietness, like the parallel one between being in company and being alone, is vital to the growth and maturity of the individual," she explains. This growth and maturity, cultivated by silence, is essential to education -- both of the mind and the soul. Reading, writing, analysis, and reflection require some level of silence. Many children, particularly teenagers, are shortchanging their education by developing a dependence on noise, even when studying (or what they call studying).

The life of the mind and the shaping of the soul require the ability to hear, recognize, and understand what would be lost in a cacophony of sound. She expresses this beautifully:

If children do not learn to focus and concentrate in a pool of quietness, their minds become fragmented and their temperaments irritable, their ability to absorb knowledge and sift it, grade it and evaluate it do not develop fully. Reading a book quietly, watching a raindrop slide slowly down a windowpane or a ladybird crawl up a leaf, trying to hear the sound of a cat breathing when it is asleep, asking strange questions, such as, "Where do all the colors go at night?" and speculating about the possible answers — all of these are best done in silence where the imagination can flourish and the intricate minutiae of the world around us can be examined with the greatest concentration.

Where do all the colors go at night? All of us, what ever our age, need the gift of silence so that we can ponder such questions -- and hear what constant noise denies us.

From Al Mohler's Blog

How I Got Comfortable Shouting To God

by Mark Altrogge on June 3rd, 2009

Shout for joy in the Lord, O you righteous!
Praise befits the upright. PS 33.1

I’m not a particularly emotional person. At football games I’ve never shouted and high-fived. I never danced or moshed or sang along or held up my lighter at concerts. And I was raised in a church in which the most expressive thing we did in worship was exchange the sign of peace with our neighbor - my brother and I would give each other a sideways glance and a smirk, then give each other the peace sign.

When Jesus saved me, I became convinced from preaching and the Word that God desires expressive worship. But for me to raise my hands or shout to God or sing with gusto was like telling me to do an Irish step dance at an opera.

But I wanted to become more expressive in my worship. I only had to overcome my fear of man.

I read about a man who conquered his self-consciousness by going out in the woods and shouting praises to the Lord. So I decided to try this. I lived on a farm at the time, so I tramped across a cow pasture to a stand of woods where I knew no one would hear me.

I looked around, raised my hands, and shouted, somewhat meekly, “Halleluiah!” I did it again, a little bit louder. I felt weird. What if someone heard me or saw me? Looking around, I shouted again, “Halleluiah!” I kept shouting over and over again, until I began to get used to it. I did this for about 15 or 20 minutes, then trudged back through the field to my apartment over the garage on the farm.

The next time I worshiped with the church, when the leader exhorted us to raise our hands and shout to the Lord, with the Lord’s help, I overcame my fear of what others thought of me and shouted my praises to Jesus.

30 years later, I still battle the fear of man at times during worship. But whenever it’s appropriate during our times of corporate worship, I love to shout my praise to the Lord. It feels good.

It feels good, because praise befits the upright.

From The Blazing Center