REST
Holy Saturday, April 16 Psalm 31: 15-16 My times are in your hands; deliver me from the hands of my enemies, from those who pursue me. Let your face shine on your servant; save me in your unfailing love. I vividly remember the first Holy Saturday of the pandemic. I remember talking with people leading up to Holy Week about the revelation that we were experiencing the most Holy Saturday of our lives. That Holy Saturday was an opportunity to stop distracting ourselves from the pain of our world and really sit in it as Jesus’ original followers did. I remember resolving to not watch Tiger King or anything else that day, to make sure I read the news, to really look at our world for what it was rather than moving straight to a silver lining or just giving up on dealing with the world all together and baking some brownies. But now I see Holy Saturday a bit differently. You see, Jesus’ early followers didn’t sit in their pain on that day because they wanted to, they sat in their pain because God commanded the whole world to rest just as God rests. They put off preparing Jesus’ body for burial, and gathering people over a meal, and maybe even finding distractions because rest is Holy. And because we have always been a people created for rest. Lately it has felt to me as if we are still in that first Holy Saturday, from 2020. Still waiting for our world to be resurrected from the pain. And yet, the world is expecting us to function at our pre-pandemic levels and, at least for me, that has been exhausting. When life is exhausting, our psalmists remind us that God has our time figured out. That God will make good, full lives out of our time if we set aside our worldly ideas about how we should be spending it. Maybe our enemy is simply anyone/anything that tells us we have to do more, that our time is not being spent as productively as it “should” be, that we should not rest. Maybe the most holy thing we can do this Holy Saturday, and all the days following is to find true rest. To dance or sing or play or read or bake or whittle or bike or whatever it is that sets your soul on fire - and then take a nap. After all, honoring the sabbath, keeping Holy rest, is one of the most clear commandments in the bible. Maybe that’s what will carry us through. How can you make time in your life to rest? Pastoral Intern Lindsay Bates
53
