The truth is, you will never be on top of it all.
So, given that reality, you must do
whatever works for you to gain some
rest. We all have different life situations,
so there is no right or wrong way to go
about this. You may need to take small
rests every evening that allow you to
wake up refreshed and ready to start the
next day, or you may have the opportunity to take a week or more by yourself. I
dream of that, but it isn’t my reality.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh understood
the value of rest and quiet moments. As
the wife of world-famous aviator Charles
Lindbergh and mother of their six children (the first infamously kidnapped and
murdered as a baby), her world was filled
with childrearing duties, writing, social
obligations, and the burden of living a
public life.
Ann took two weeks of vacation by
herself in a Florida beach house. It was
there that she wrote her most enduring
work, Gift From the Sea. A contempla-
tive book with her reflections on the lives
of twentieth-century women, Gift From
the Sea reminds me in its short essays
that the care of my soul is an important
and worthwhile investment. My soul—
and yours—needs rest and time to think.
For life today in America is based on
the premise of ever-widening circles
of contact and communication. It
involves not only family demands,
but community demands, national
demands, international demands on
the good citizen, through social and
cultural pressures, through newspapers, magazines, radio programs,
political drives, charitable appeals,
and so on. My mind reels in it. What
a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. It puts the trapeze artist to shame. Look at us. We
run a tight rope daily, balancing a
pile of books on the head. Baby-carriage, parasol, kitchen chair, still
under control. Steady now!
I find that too. When I take the time
to pull back, stop, rest, and not allow
those laundry piles to scream at me, I
have more to give to my family, and what
I give them is truly “richer, more vivid,
fuller than before.”
You know who else knew this truth
and lived it so well? Jesus. He had har-
ried, full, demanding days and yet He
knew the importance of getting away for
a quiet time of listening to God’s steady
voice. We see one such moment de-
scribed in Mark 1:21–35:
Does that sound like your life? Indeed,
it’s very much like mine. Anne also un-
derstood the value of being alone:
And they went into Capernaum;
and straightway on the sabbath day
he entered into the synagogue, and
taught. And they were astonished at
his doctrine: for he taught them as
one that had authority, and not as the
scribes. And there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit;
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