Resting the body through taking time off of work, and relaxation, and resting the mind through practicing mindfulness, prayer, or meditation are really important.  However, even if you do these two practices you will not not necessarily find peace.  The answers to our exhaustion or our restlessness does not come from resting the body or resting the mind.  In fact, I think that those will elude you, slipping through your fingers like sand, without the third essential element of rest.

Rest for the soul is the single most important element for true rest.  The other two covered will give as rest but it will always be a fleeting and transient sort of rest.  There will always be stress, your body and mind will eventually perish (yeah, it is a bummer.) The rest for that is for your soul is what will carry you through death into eternity.  How does the soul get rest?  If you ask me (and you didn’t, but that never stopped me) that kind of peace of the soul is rather elusive.  To really capture what it means to have soul rest, means to really chew and chew on the meat of God’s word while savoring His promises.  When I have experienced this rest, I felt amazing peace of mind, body and spirit.  Yet, over time I would slowly grow colder to the peace.  My feelings show where my heart is wavering but the Lord offers rest freely, regardless of my experience of it.  Partake and be filled, weary traveler.  The road to Him can be long, bumpy and downright treacherous.  Your burdens too heavy to bear.  The pressures of your life–the wayward husband, the sick child, the impossible job schedule, bankruptcy–are all closing in on you with no end in sight.  You can’t sleep for the worries that swim in your head over your loved ones.  You ache in your depths and your body knows it because it echoes the pain in your bones.

Resting in the Lord is submitting to His will, even when His will might mean the crushing of our lives.  Why submit to such atrocity?  To such defiling pain and anguish?  Why ask the Lord, to enter in and do what he wants with us?  Visions of Pinocchio, slave to his strings manned by a puppeteer come to mind.  Yet, that isn’t what is happening, dear soul.  You are submitting your life to a God who loves you more than you can imagine.  This Father who craves your wholeness must use your brokenness to get there.  (Thank you, Ann Voskamp for your book, the Broken Way, for giving me so much to wrestle with).  Why is our brokenness part of the story?  Because it was His brokenness that began the story of our wholeness.  We cannot be whole without His brokenness.  

Soul Rest is being sure of God’s goodness AND His willingness to rescue us.