Rest is the week between Christmas Day & New Years Eve and literally no one has a clue what day it is or what to do with themselves and everywhere i look there are advertisements telling me that i should be planning this and getting myself ready to achieve this or to keep myself busy by doing the following…
We all want to achieve something and create something, we are made in the image of a God who is a creator after all, and marketing companies etc know this very well and try to sell us items and lifestyles based around the ‘New Years Resolutions’ & ‘New Year New You’ mentality.
Instead what needs to happen is that we rest with God, we take time to read the bible and spend time with him, thanking him for what has gone before and for what he is going to do with us, we need to take time to switch off and allow God room to speak into us and to plant new fresh seeds of creation
I remember hearing an interview on the BBC with Mumford & Sons (yes i do like them) shortly after the reveal of their new sound with the single ‘Believe’, asked why they had such a new style in the third album one of the members stated, ‘We wrote the second album while touring the first one, so Babel was influenced on what we had going on, while this album was written after a break’
I believe that for us all if you don’t rest and almost reset your brain you won’t create something new, what you will do is simply create a continuation of whats gone before, essentially
No rest = Evolution of old ideas
Rest = Revolution with God ideas
This is actually day two of trying to write this blog and it looks very little like the original version which i guess i’ll call that a ‘proof readers special edition!’ I really want to get to the heart of what i wanted to say and yesterday i tried and tried but just couldn’t do it, the joys of taking such a long break from writing is that the first time back can be quite difficult.
So while im frustrated that i cant get across what i want to say properly and i know part of the reason for that is my taking a break from writing, however as i write this and look at my notepad i can see that i have 4 new blog titles and ideas of where i want to go with that writing sitting in front of me. In the history of this blog i have never had that, i’ve never went to write a post with more than an idea or at best a key sentence in my mind and so as i look down and see all these ideas as actually now understand the heart of this post, the whole point of this post is to say that if we just keep going in routine all we will get is a continuation of old ideas and things will be hard, but if we take a break (even though this break for me was partly unintentional!) we will find that we are surrounded by ideas, God driven ideas and the best thing about these is that we don’t even realise that they are God given until we sit down and take stock of them….
In order to get the full benefit of a God given idea during a time of rest, you need to actually rest into him even more so that he can fully reveal the idea to you. It was during a time of rest that i decided i wanted to write this blog and it wasn’t in my striving that i finished it but it was when i pushed it as far as i could and then i rested and asked God to help me finish the idea.
I pray you have a restful time as the new year approaches and that 2017 is the year of revolution with God in your own life and those around you.