mgpcpastor's blog

My wife loves babies.
The five that we had and anyone elses. Just loves them. At morning tea I could pretty much tell anyone wanting Margaret to look for the woman holding a baby.
All babies seem to have one thing in common: they don’t want to go to sleep.
You can see their drooping expressions, reddening eyes, hands and arms constantly rubbing against their faces.
But when you try to go from holding them upright to laying them down in your arms they usually wriggle and fight to gain the upright position: they don’t want to go to sleep.
There seems to be some innate desire not to miss something. Their infant minds are preoccupied with curiosity, desire and self-will.
To sleep is to be missing out on something (even if they don’t know what) and to surrender to the agenda of another.
For years one of our daughters, when told it was bedtime, would invariable respond ‘But I’ve been good,’ as if nightly rest was some form of punishment.
And yet a parent knows something their child will not acknowledge: rest is necessary, it is essential.
We’ve watched the internal battery of a little person run down and we know that it needs to recharge so they can go return to an interactive state instead of the particularly grumpy and self-centered from we now hold.
So we embrace their wriggling forms, jigging up and down or pacing the room, cooing in sympathy with their protestations. The eyelids blink, then blink more slowly, and then they close and do not open, closed portals on a face still bearing the glum expression of indignant frustration. Then even their faces relax and they rest.
The Scriptures relate the call of Jesus, who promises that he will give us rest. We want to struggle against that. We fear we may miss something. We have our own agendas and resting in Him seems to interfere with their implementation.
The objects we want, the news we long to hear, the people we desperately seek to control, the outcomes we think only we can engineer. Our lives can be a protestation of self-will and self-centered desire to reshape our environment after our own image.
And yet He calls us to rest.
He knows what is best for us. And we can feel Him holding us in an embrace from which no-one can pluck us and from which we cannot fall.
Eventually we come to realise what He knew all along.
No achievement permanently stills our desires.
No relationship perfectly fulfills our needs.
No possession satiates want.
None of these make us whole.
Only rest in Him can do that.
His patience with us is to hear our protestations and endure our mistakes, even as we make them over and over again.
I’d like to think that we grow in our capacity to yield to His embrace, to accept His judgment that what we really need to do is desist from whatever it is we are doing to secure our own sense of peace and satisfaction and rest in Him.
But I’m thankful that He doesn’t leave it up to me, and that He holds me and bids me rest in Him until I do.