Why We Should Rest – Avoiding a Dust Bowl (Donald Miller)

If you’ve read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, you know what happens when farmers fail to rotate their crops and let the ground rest. What happens is, of course, devastation. We’ve all seen pictures of Oklahoma during the dust bowl, that season when the ground, empty of nutrients, let go in any wind and suffocated and entire region. People took shelter in their homes but the dust got through the cracks, into their beds, into their food. Soon, hundreds of thousands had to move away.

I bring this up because the same thing can happen in our minds and souls if we aren’t careful to get rest. *Photo by USDAgov, Creative Commons  God asks us to take a sabbath and to take it seriously. Mirroring other aspects of His creation, we also know that maintaining our physical and mental health with nightly rest and an entire “day off” is what we need to keep our minds fertile. More than once I’ve taken a day off when I had pressing work only to find I was twice as productive when I came back. Around Storyline we sometimes say “rest is work” and we mean it. We will get more done if we get time with friends and family, connect with God or just to watch football for an afternoon. Try it. The results are terrific. Of course we can get too much rest, but few of us have the luxury. Most of us are too busy to rest. And when we’re too busy to rest, we’re less productive. So as an organization intent on helping good people live great stories, we whole-heartedly endorse taking a day to simply rest. Otherwise, there’s going to be dust. And lots of it. -Donald Miller