A Restful People in a Restless World

Another weekend approaches with not nearly enough time to cover all the responsibilities and decisions. There are bills, house chores and errands to run. A highly demanding job or the schedules of your kids may also add more on top of these responsibilities. Your boss is asking for a project that needed to be done days ago, or your child is asking to join a sports club that regularly conflicts with Sunday services at your local church. You have enough to manage personally even without others asking for more from you. When a friend texts you the question, “How are you doing this weekend?” you respond, “I’m busy.”  

“I’m busy” is the most expressed confession of our time. This confession comes from a restless world that no longer finds rest in the Lord.  

Our world no longer centers itself on the life of faith—where church buildings are built in the center of town, where church bells keep time and where society practices slowing down to rest in God and worship Him. Instead, polarizing beliefs keep us isolated, the incessant “ding” of notifications demands our attention and the acceleration of society burdens us with constant busyness and endless responsibilities. Even Sunday mornings aren’t immune to the increased pressure to check in with work or bring one’s kids to the latest weekend tournament instead of the weekly practice of gathering to worship.  

We live in a secular age, which, as philosopher Charles Taylor explains, isn’t merely the absence of faith but a foundational shift in the way everyone naturally views and experiences life. The world is no less sacred than it ever was, but our experience of it is profoundly secular, compelling us to live as if the sacred doesn’t exist. A sacred world is God-centered; a secular world is self-centered. A sacred world is more communal; a secular world is more individualistic. A sacred world understands external spiritual forces that can impact our life; a secular world believes only in the impact of internal forces that we can control.    

Our exhausting world  

What does it feel like to live in a secular world? In a word, exhausting. Drawing on the work of philosopher Hartmut Rosa, author Andrew Root explains one key consequence of living in a secular world is a pervasive sense of acceleration. With the secular world’s focus on efficiency, productivity and technological advancement, life can feel like it’s constantly changing and speeding up. And when we can’t keep up with the pace of culture, it’s understandable we feel anxious and exhausted.

If “I’m busy” is the most common confession of secular life, it’s because “do more” is the slogan. Here are some examples of the different areas of life that are impacted by acceleration: 

• Technology accelerates life. New is better, which means the shelf life of technology is incredibly short. While technology makes certain tasks easier, it doesn’t actually slow things down. When a machine does your laundry, the expectation of a secular age is not that you use that time to play cards with your friends and family; it’s that you can “do more.” You can wash your clothes, catch up on emails, and clean the kitchen simultaneously while the phone rings again and again, building up messages you’ll eventually have to answer. The pace of life picks up the number of tasks we’re doing at any given moment.  
• Work is also accelerating. Our workplaces are highly competitive and changing environments. Growth is the dominant metric––increase customers, increase revenue, see more patients and teach more courses to more students to be successful. And if workplaces don’t see growth, there seems to only be one solution: innovation. If the current set up isn’t working, organizations innovate to fix decline. But constant cycles of innovation are exhausting. As soon as you learn the old system, it’s no longer relevant. This creates immense pressure, where workers feel like they need to be constantly striving without meaningful rest.  

• This impacts relationships and friendships. As life accelerates work and family, and when online time also increases, opportunities for face-to-face interactions—and friendship—are often drowned out. Even attempts to go out with friends need to be planned weeks or months in advance. Who has time for a weekly small group or regular happy hour when there is so much to do?  
• Churches are impacted by these realities. Churches are seen as successful if attendance is growing, the budget is busting and more ministry programs are added. The acceleration of church ministries impacts church staff, volunteers and congregants. They may feel overwhelmed by the number of ministries but also feel pressure to maintain them, since cutting a ministry is often seen as a sign of decline. The answer to decline in ministry is the same as the marketplace––innovation. Old and tested ways of church ministry are then often replaced with new and fresh ways forward. 

The secular world is exhausting. There is always more to be done and potential to realize. At its core, the secular world promises that you can have it all if you’re just able to keep up with the demands of career and responsibilities at home while implementing the right systems of self-help to keep your head above water. How do we snap out of this exhausting pace?  

Finding meaningful connection  

While slowing down certainly helps, Hartmut Rosa suggests we focus on something more profound: resonance.  

Resonance is a deep and transformative connection with the world, an open and receptive posture that allows us to experience something meaningful. Resonance explains the goosebumps a person feels when listening to a nostalgic song or the feeling of being completely understood when sharing a meal with a friend. In these moments, music and friendship transcend purely functional interaction to foster deep, meaningful connection. Resonance is finding God in daily life when we’re not so distracted to miss Him. 

Writing for Christianity Today, Aryana Petrosky reflects on her accelerated life in Washington D.C. She describes her life as constantly navigating the tension between speeding up and slowing down, which impacted her ability to connect with the Lord:  

“I obsessively counted minutes when I was in transit on foot, bike, or metro. If I found myself frozen—waiting in line at the grocery store or on the public bus—I would immediately pull out my phone and scroll and scroll and scroll, attempting to escape time, wishing there were fewer minutes. I would have walked right past the burning bush or looked back down at my phone at the disruption of an angel.”  

If Moses had been caught up in the acceleration of life, would he have missed God speaking through the burning bush? If Mary got too distracted with the pace of her world, would she have noticed the presence of an angel?  

These are the many examples of God’s presence breaking into our world during ordinary days of life. Our fast-paced life is often not only disconnected and detached from the world and relationships but also disenchanted from the real and eternal life that dwells among us. 

Resting in God’s presence    

The story of Scripture reveals the Lord always provides a sanctuary where we can meet with Him and rest in His presence. Whether that sanctuary is a garden in creation (Genesis), a tent in the wilderness (Exodus), or a temple in the city (1 Kings), God provides a place where His heavenly presence intersects our earthly life. Even when sin removes God’s people from Eden, God promises to dwell among us (Ezekiel 40-48), preparing the way for a true and better sanctuary.  

Jesus is the true and better sanctuary where the fullness of God’s presence dwells. The Gospel of John announces the good news that Jesus, the eternal Word of God, “became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).  

It’s no wonder that when people encounter Him, they encounter life. When the blind come to Jesus, they receive sight. When the weary come to Jesus, they receive rest. When sinners come to Jesus, they are forgiven. Even when torn down by death on a cross, Christ the sanctuary is rebuilt through the power of the resurrection (John 2:21-22), tearing the veil that separated us from God’s life-giving presence (Matt 27:50-51).  

The gospel sets up the most radical step for God’s plan to establish a sanctuary among His people. Before Jesus ascended to heaven, Jesus pours out the Holy Spirit––the very presence of God––on His people so that they become His sanctuary that brings rest and life to the world (1 Pet 2:5). God’s people are now a refuge that invites the weary and the burdened into rest and life.  

Practices of rest and renewal  

How can we practice resting in God’s presence and bring a measure of that rest to a weary world? There is so much wisdom in learning how to detach from distracting habits and practicing sacred habits that increase resonance and rest with the Lord. These practices help us to ponder the things that are pure, lovely, admirable, and praiseworthy (Phil 4:8).  

Instead of filling our souls with content from an algorithm, we can start our mornings and end our evenings in short times of prayer and meditation of Scripture. Instead of grabbing food from a drive-thru, we can fill a dining room table with a meal and surround it with our household and neighbors.  

We can also choose to live by a different calendar. While we work most of the week, we can embrace contentment in our responsibilities, remembering our daily work is not merely a means to endless growth but rather vocations to steward for God’s glory. Rather than striving all week long, we can embrace an entire day each week with worship at our local church and rest from our striving. We honor a day that is not dedicated to personal productivity, but to acts of goodness and drawing near to God (Matt 12:12).  

This commitment pushes back against the pressure to be productive at all times. Many Christians and churches center their lives around the church calendar with the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter, setting our days around the story of Christ. These practices don’t eliminate our daily responsibilities, but they do nourish our souls and provide the strength to get through each day with deeper meaning and purpose.   

The local church also has a mission that requires wisdom and contextualization to meet the unique hopes and struggles of its neighbors. However, this essential work must resist the secular acceleration that turns ministry into an endless striving for innovation and judges success by purely worldly definitions of growth. We turn back to the ordinary practices that have defined the Church for centuries: faithfully following the Lord’s command to baptize and make disciples who bear fruit of the Spirit through the ordinary means of grace provided in the ministry of the Word and the fellowship at the Lord’s Table.  

In a constantly updating culture, preaching God’s Word provides the timeless and unchanging truth that anchors the hearts and minds of the congregation. Fellowship at the Lord’s Table provides a tangible and communal act that celebrates unity in Christ in a fragmented world. We trust that God’s power still resides in these simple acts of ministry, not in our own innovative strategies, such as weekly worship on the Lord’s Day, Christians who gather in homes to break bread and open the Word in prayer, and equipping our congregation for acts of service and neighborly love.  

The expectation of these ministries shouldn’t be to produce a spreadsheet with a line graph showing continuous growth. Instead, we remember that there is a time and season for everything, trusting God’s providence over our projections and ideas. Sometimes we minister in the summer when fruitfulness is bursting everywhere, and other times we minister in winter when the fruit is more limited and modest.  

As we are nourished by these means of grace through faith, and experience God’s presence in union with Christ, we bring the good news of rest to a restless world. This isn’t a grand, complicated mission. It’s a simple one, lived out in the ordinary and tangible acts of a faithful life. We invite our neighbors into our restful lives––not through a flashy campaign but through the simple act of welcoming them into our homes for a meal, experiencing rest on the Lord’s Day or hearing the Scriptures through meditation or proclamation. We invite them to hear the Lord who says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matt 11:28).  

Rather than getting caught up in the acceleration of this world, we abide in Christ. The Lord Jesus not only provides rest for our restless and weary souls, but He makes us a sanctuary for our neighbors who need a refuge from this empty and exhausting world.  

Our exhausted souls confess “I’m busy,” but the restful soul confesses, with Saint Augustine, “I find my rest in Thee.”